Let's say you want start working out. Initially, you're really excited about making a positive change
to your life.You tempted to make this habit stick in the past
and failed,
but this time it gonna be different. You set your alarm super early
, you wake up, you lace up your running shoes and
you hit your workout
The first few days are like clockwork
You wake up early, you workout. You wake up early
and you workout.
But then,
life gets in the way. You have a late night of drinking with co-workers,
you go on vacation. Something bump
you off your routine. All the sudden this attempt
lines up with every other previous failed attempt.
You do not have
a healthy habit that sticks
So what went wrong
That's why I want to talk about in today video .
But real quick, I'm actually making a course, it's a 3 weeks course
on habit changes and if you like the video
that I made here on youtube, then I think
you really gonna like this, I think you gonna get a lot of value from it
So, just go to...
... sign up and
I will let you know right it gonna become available.
Okay, back to the video. So, recently
I sat down
to talk with Nate Green. He's an author and fitness expert
that have been featured on both Tim Ferriss's blog
as well as Men's Health. Nate:" We spend a lot of time on a lot of researches
looking into how do people change".
According to Nate, one of the reason we fail is
because we don't truly understand behavior of psychology.
But simply, we don't get how our brain
really work, so we get super ambitious and
super excited about making a change in our life
and we set really high expectation for ourselves
and when everything falls apart
we wonder Why didn't that work.
Nate dove into deep details about
how we can actually make changes in our life
that stick for the long run
The way that I look at like behavioral change and I turning into knowledge
and the actions is like
what is just the basic that I need to know about this.
What the skills that I need to know
How do I break those skills down into small practices
and then how I can make it so easy that it's almost
embarrassing, like anyone can do that
We work with the new client and
they have a new habit
and the habit is to
... let's say Go to the gym three times a week.
A good coach or someone that know
behavioral change, what those do is shrink
that change, especially for something new to the client
,right? So instead of go to the gym 3 times per week
we ask them a question like on scale of
1 to 10 how confidence are you
that you can actually go to the gym 3 times a week
Think about your schedule, think about what you have going on, look at the next week
and if the client answer anything less
than 7 or less
like 1:not confidence, 10:very confidence to 7 or less,
we shrink it. How about 2 days a week
Uhm...7. How about 1 day a week
Oh I can do that, that's F*** easy. Anyone can go to the gym 1 day a week.
And that's the habit that we start with
And that's the only thing we measure for a couple of weeks or a month
Are you consistently going to the gym and doing this
one workout, one day per week?
And it seem like just a small change,
but for someone who never is worked out before, if they
consistently go to the gym one day a week
that's 52 workouts in a year, when they may have done
zero beforehand, and overtime
that builds up into a instinct whereas our life were totally different than it was 2
ago
And it feel like nothing much have changed, but the same time
everything has F*** changed. So I think a lot of people
see those who are incredibly fit
they got the impact abs or they built a successful business
and you think that it requires a lot of
complexity to get there.
But in reality, what they done is layer on
knowledge. It starts with just enough
in the beginning. You don't want to overwhelm yourself
and overcomplicate things. Because
all you need to do is create consistency
in your life,... first. You can add complexity
later, but for now try to keep things simple.