54: 75 Days of Hard Things

I am disciplined. My mental fortitude allows me to choose what I want most over what I want in the moment.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today.

I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. This I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

We are going to talk about something in this episode that really I haven't talked about on this podcast yet and that is some health related things. And so at first glance you might think I didn't sign up for that, right? This is a podcast all about creative entrepreneurship. But if you don't know this about me, you'll soon get to know more that I very much feel like a strong body equals a strong, strong mind. In fact, I think that really paying attention to our health and our body and really putting effort there to making our bodies strong and pushing there really assures the health of our mind and therefore leads to greater creativity. So I'm going to share a little bit about something that I've been doing for the last almost 75 days. Meaning I'm just a few days away from finishing the this 75 day thing that I've been doing and I want to share with you what it was, why I did it, what my results have been, what I will keep, what I'll let go, and some lessons that I learned along the way. So some of you are probably familiar with this thing called 75 hard. And I didn't actually do 75 hard, but I was inspired by it. 75 hard is something that Andy Frisella came up with and it's basically a challenge. It's a health and body and mind challenge. And so the traditional 75 hard challenge rules are that for 75 days you follow a diet, no cheats and no alcohol. You do two 45 minute workouts and one has to be outside. You drink a gallon of water, you read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, and you take progress pictures. So I kind of was inspired by this, but I changed the rules a bit because I very much wanted to set some very specific goals. I wanted to create some very specific habits and maybe break some other habits. And I wanted to just do some hard things first for 75 days. And so before I tell you what exactly I did, let me tell you why I did it in the first place. I have always been health forward, health conscious. I've been plant based for over 11 years now. I also work out routinely. I do CrossFit at least five days a week. And so I'm always prioritizing my health. However, something happened last year and I ended up in a place where I wasn't feeling the way that I wanted to feel. And so I think when I reflect on that, what happened was that we didn't travel much in 2020 or in 2021, for obvious reasons. The pandemic was in full force, you know, and so we just didn't travel much. And so in 2022, 2 we did, we got back into our traveling routine. We might have traveled more than ever. And so typically, one way that I travel is kind of just do whatever I want. I eat whatever I want. I, you know, maybe work out less when I travel. And typically that's fine because when I get back home, I get kind of back on the bandwagon. But we traveled so, so much in 2022 that I found myself feeling like I wasn't strong. I had put on about £15, and I just wasn't feeling the way that I wanted to feel. And when I say that, let me tell you how I love to feel. I love to feel well rested. I love to feel strong. I love to kind of hit the ground running in the morning and feel energized. I want to feel fresh, focused in the day. And I want to feel like when I work out, I can go hard, I can push, I've got energy, I've got, you know, this, this level of ability to really go after it, right? And I just wasn't. I had was, you know, still working out, I was still eating okay, but I just wasn't feeling that extra oomph that I really love to feel. And so that's what started this almost 75 days ago. I was really just ready to hit it into high gear and do a hard reset. And so I think as you listen to this episode, you might also be inspired to come up with some things that you want to do for maybe it's 75 days, or maybe it's 30 days or 100 days, whatever it is. But so I want to take you through some of the things that really helped me. I know when I do something like this, accountability is a huge part of it. So I did two things. Number one, I reached out to my closest friends in my hometown and asked them if they wanted to do a version of this with me. And then the other thing I did was I asked the same thing of my mastermind. So you've met the ladies. In my Mastermind, there are 30 of us, all creative entrepreneurs, spirit spread out all over the world. And so 18 of us decided to do 75 days of some hard things together. We did a little pop up group where we were able to talk every day and come in and just share our challenges and our wins and the research that we were doing and the books we were reading and, and the podcast episodes that we were listening to and all this kind of stuff. And I created us a spot spreadsheet tracker which by the way, I'm going to give you a copy of as today's free download in case you want to do it as well. And so I created a tracker and we just did a little check in every day and if we skipped a day, we just added it onto our own personal 75 day tracker. Okay, so are you ready to hear? What I did was two workouts, but a little bit of a change to this. So I signed myself up for two workouts a day, Monday through Friday and one on Saturday and Sunday. And so that's not much more than I was doing already because I work out in the morning. I do like a functional fitness, almost CrossFit style workout in the mornings. And so what this was doing was adding on one on Sunday and then an afternoon activity. And so what I chose to do was just simply go for a walk. And my favorite thing about this is that I very intentionally did this walk with the people in my life that I want to keep up with. So my mom, my friends and David and my kids, we would just kind of rotate through anybody who could or would want to join and just go for a walk. And it allowed for so much rich conversation and it was such a better thing to do to catch up with friends or family than, you know, go out for a drink or for lunch. So we would go for a walk instead. The next one is that you're supposed to, if you're doing 75 hard proper, follow a diet. Well, you know, I'm already plant based, but what I wanted to do was track my macros. I'm not going to get too far into macros in this episode, but if it's something that you're interested in, I could do an entire episode on this alone. So macro tracking has been phenomenally beneficial for me and there's a lot of different ways that you can approach it depending on your, you know, personal goals. And so for this time period what I did was track everything and my goal was to hit 50% of my calories from carbohydrates, 25% of my calories from protein and 25% of my calories from fat. So that was what I was doing. And I've got an article that is a great read that kind of explains macros and how to get started on them in a basic way that I'll link with the show notes of this episode Next. I bought a big old water bottle and my goal was to drink 120 ounces of water, water a day. This was huge for me. It was also difficult but I think that I was perhaps dehydrated over the long term. And so this was something that I really wanted to do and I'm so glad that I did it. Of course, no alcohol and I also, instead of reading 10 pages of a non fiction, I kind of do that anyways. I wanted to prioritize and specifically set up some habits around my morning routine and, and my devotion time. So that's what I used for that, for my 75 days of hard things. Okay, so we're gonna go one by one and talk about each of them, what I'm going to keep. And then at the end of the episode I'm also gonna share with you my results what happened over the last 75 days. But before I go one by one, what I wanna do is talk about some of the mindset stuff with this. If you ever embark on a multi day like a long new habit creation like this, that thing that we did, I highly suggest picking up a book to read during that time that will support your new habit creation. And so I have two books that I absolutely love and highly recommend. The first one is High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard. This book is incredible and super impactful. Brendan is amazing and you'll love this book so much. The second one I had, I had read Brendan's book, you know, in the past year. And so the one that I read for this specific challenge was called the Power to Change Mastering the Habits that Matter Most by Craig Groeschel. If you're not familiar with Craig. He is a pastor. So this has a little bit of a lens to it from a spiritual perspective, but it is a phenomenal book and will help you really understand habit changing from a different perspective, which was incredible. So we'll link both of those in the show notes for today's episode. So from these two books, there were three things that I really learned and tried to implement throughout these days of establishing these new habits. The first one, I actually heard from Brooke Castillo during a speech. And so I don't have a link for this one, but Brooke was. Brooke is a life coach, and she was basically talking about how if she wants to try something new, rather than build up, you know, emotions about it and give it up one day and all of this stuff that goes along with it, she thinks about it as if she's trying on a pair of clothes and she can try them on, and if she doesn't like the way they fit, she can just take them right back off. And that one was really beneficial for me. Like, you can try on a thought or an identity shift or a new habit, and if it ends up not serving you, then you can just let it go. And that took some of the emotion out of all of this as well. And so that was one. Number two is something called the keystone habit. This also kind of coincides with habit stacking. And so a keystone habit is one thing that you do every single day, no matter what. It's easy for you. You established it a long time ago. And so around that keystone habit, you can stack other habits that you want to. To add. So, for instance, if you drink coffee every morning, you never forget. You always do it. And you're trying to create a new habit of reading a book. Maybe you place the book on top of your coffee maker the night before, and so you stack those habits on top of each other, Right? Or if you're trying to start flossing, maybe you, you know, keep the floss right beside your toothbrush so one triggers the reminder for the other. So. So that was big for me. I specifically had to do this with water. I had to leave my water bottle at a particular place in the morning so that I would fill it up and remember to take it with me. And then the last thing was triggers. So oftentimes when we're doing things that don't serve us, we're typically triggered by something. So I'll share with you. One of my personal triggers is that typically I, I am really hungry when I come home in the afternoon, and that's when I start to cook dinner. And so kind of my weakness is snacking on tortilla chips and salsa when I get home while I cook dinner. So I did a couple of things here to try to overcome that. Number one, I removed the trigger. I talked to David about it, and I'm like, we're gonna keep the chips out of sight. We're just gonna put them up in the cabinet so that every time I walk into the pantry, I'm not triggered by them, I'm not sitting seeing them. And that was actually really huge for me. And then the other one that I did was that I started keeping packs of dry roasted edamame in my car and I would eat a pack on my way home, which would just completely satisfy my hunger. It would be a little boost of protein and I wouldn't walk in the door ready to devour the first thing I saw. Right? So those two things were really, really helpful. Habit stacking or that keystone habit, and then removing any triggers, like doing ourselves a favor right when we have willpower so that we're not triggered by something that we're trying to stop doing in our moment of weakness.

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And then my biggest takeaway this is from the Power to Change by Craig Groeschel, was that typically when you're trying to form new habits, the actual behavior modification is not what sticks long term. What does stick long term is an actual identity shift, meaning you have to believe something specific about yourself and then the habit will fall like the new action taking place will fall into line after that. And so the identity that I very much grasped onto during this whole entire process was this. I am disciplined. My mental fortitude allows me to choose what I want most over what I want in the moment. Isn't that so powerful? So I'm going to read it again. I'm disciplined. My mental fortitude allows me to choose what I want most over what I want in the moment, which helped me make so many good decisions because I believed something different about myself. Myself. I proclaimed it. I said it. I said it every single day. And I really coached myself through making better decisions because I believed that I was a disciplined person. Okay, so those were the three experiment or try it on. Try on your new thought, your new habit, and see what it feels like. Number two, keystone habits. Number three, triggers. And then the final kind of big takeaway for me was an identity shift. And my personal one was around being disciplined. So let's go over the things that I did and then I'll tell you what my results were and what I'm going to keep. So I already mentioned this. My two workouts. The first one is CrossFit. The second one was a walk and if it was raining, I would kind of modify that. I would do Something inside the gym or something like that. And then I added a simple walk on Sundays. I am absolutely going to keep this. And the number one reason I'm going to keep this is because of the relationships that really got nourished during the last 75 days. I'm still going to intentionally walk and get together with my mom, my sister, my friends, my family so that we can have intentional focus, time to catch up and also be doing something active and outside. So this is one of my favorite new habits. I'm absolutely keeping that one. The second was the diet and specifically tracking macros. So tracking macros is something that requires a lot of discipline, meaning when you do it, you actually have to weigh your food. And so I don't do this year round. This is probably the fourth time I've done it for like 12 week intervals. And I like doing that because again, it's kind of that hard reset. And it also really helps me remember what I'm aiming for. But I'm also not the type to, you know, weigh their food all year long or anything like that. So kind of like to do it, experiment with it, have that hard reset and then I relax. Part of this was also trying to figure out what this looked like when we traveled. So I had some trips during this time. 75 days. We had a mastermind retreat. I had a anniversary trip and a couple of other things. And so what does it look like to travel on this? Do I, you know, keep up with everything or do I shift it around a little bit? And so for me, I didn't track macros on trips, but I did try to prioritize, like knowing what I know, what I put on my plate. And then I pretty much kept to everything. I fell back to one workout a day and had a little bit of extra grace for the other things as well, but pretty much stayed on track the entire time. 120 ounces of water has been life changing. Absolutely. Keeping that one no alcohol was not difficult for me. However, I have leaned into this even more and have enjoyed it so much. So I never have, you know, drank much. I may have traditionally had like one drink a week here and there, especially if we were going out with friends or something like that. But I was really strict with it over this past several weeks and have really just loved and intentionally researched the benefits of just not having any alcohol at all. And one of the major things that I've started to do is track my sleep. So I have an oura ring that's O U R a we'll link that in the show notes as well. And what it does is track your REM and your deep sleep at night, along with a whole host of other things. And so I've been trying to prioritize sleeping better as well and specifically getting more deep sleep. And what I noticed is even one drink, like one glass of wine will wreck my. My sleep that night. It'll take my REM cycles from six or seven down to two. And then I just feel like it's harder to maintain that high level of focus and clarity the following day. And that just means it's really not worth it to me. And so I've been navigating, going out with friends and going on trips and trying not to make anybody else feel bad if they're having a drink, but also not being willing to. To bend on this new habit of mine as well. And I've just been really loving it. So I'm planning on keeping that one. I don't like to always say always or never, but this one I've really leaned into and enjoyed so much. And so I'm planning on keeping that one and then reading and doing my devotion and my whole morning routine. You know, I think I skipped this once and honestly had a horrible day. Like, just felt like I was in a funk the whole time. And so for sure I'm keeping that one as well. And so I'm not going to be tracking and checking off boxes and things like that, but the vast majority of things that I began to establish during these 75 days, I've decided to keep. And that's really, really incredible. So naturally, I'll probably clock a few less workouts in a week. I probably won't be as strict on on macros, and I may not hit as much water every single day, but for sure, more than I was 75 days ago. So are you ready for results? I did lose some weight, which, again, that wasn't the biggest goal. My goal was really very specifically focused on how I wanted to feel. But the scale does show £12 less in 75 days, which is incredible. I'm back to where I wanted to be. I'm back to where I was about a year ago. This is where I feel strong. This is where I feel good. And so I'm so glad that that happened really easily. But the one that I really want to focus on is how I'm feeling. And it's hard to even express to you how great I'm feeling when one thing in particular is that when I'm working out, I Have like one or two or maybe three gears beyond what I typically have had for the last year. For the last year I have shown up and I have worked out, but I have just not felt light on my feet or like I could push really hard. And so for the last, this probably, this probably took about a month, the first month. And then I just started tapping into this gear that feels so good. Meaning when I start to work out or I start to go for a run, I feel like I could go forever. I feel like I could go faster, I can lift stronger, I can lift heavier or whatever it is. I just feel really good. And that is an incredible feeling. That is probably why I don't want to give up the fast pack majority of this because I'm feeling so incredibly good. The other thing is that my sleep has completely turned around. So I was getting like less than 25 minutes of deep sleep a night and over the last 12 weeks have now been consistently getting at least two hours of deep sleep a night. And so I'm finding that I'm waking up earlier, meaning I don't even need as much much sleep as I was getting before. And I'm feeling ready to hit the day. I'm feeling focused all day. And this is really one of the biggest game changers for me. And then the other big result again is all relational. What has happened in my mastermind has also been so beautiful because we all, 18 of us, all of us have different relationships with food and goals and, and fitness and alcohol. And it's just really brought all of these really beautiful conversations to life. What is our history and what are our goals? So everyone in the Mastermind has come up with their own list of things that they wanted to do for 75 days. So one person is doing a keto diet and tracking macros and a couple of other girls are reading a book together. One of the ladies only wants to run for 75 days straight, so that's the only thing she wants to do. Nothing else is on her list. Just a 75 day streak of running, which has been incredible. And so it's just been so fun to grow together in this way. And I can't recommend it highly enough. You are so strong and so capable of doing anything that you want to do. If there's a change that you want to make or that you want to see or you want to feel a different way, then it's all within your power to do. You just need to get started doing it. So that's what I've been doing. For the last 75 days. I hope that maybe this episode gave you some ideas on something that you could do or habit that you could start trying to maintain as well. Again, I'm giving you a copy of our 75 day habit tracker. This is a Google spreadsheet all designed for you so it's really easy to just go in and check off the box for the day. You can also invite friends to do work off the same one with you so you can have an accountability piece together with this if you want and so you can get that at today's show. Notes My friends, thank you so much for for tuning in today. Always work to create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. Bye for now.