TWO things you have to change, if you want to build better habits and behaviours

All right, today we're going to talk about 2 things that you need to change if you want to build better health habits and behaviors into your life. And actually, if you want to make any type of transformative change in your life. And those 2 things that you need to think about and change are 1, people, and 2, environment. So let's unpack that a little bit. I challenge you to think about a positive change, a new habit, a new behavior that you've been successful in making in your life. And these things usually happen over a period of time, right? So if you go back and look at that journey, I think what you will notice is that the people in your life and the people that you're surrounding yourself with, as well as your environment, had to change over the course of that change. And on the flip side, if you try and think about a habit or behavior or change in your life that you have struggled to make in the past, perhaps there's even a change at the moment that you're trying to make that you're struggling with. What will stand out is that the people around you and your environment is probably fairly static and not changing that much. So you really need to think about these two things if you want to bring new habits and new behaviors or any type of change into your life. They are super critical for you being able to make a change in your life. And I know it sounds big and scary to kind of make changes to both people and environment. But the changes don't have to be all at once and they don't have to be gigantic changes. You don't necessarily need to up sticks and move to a new town straight away. You don't need to start ghosting friends and family. It usually happens much more subtly and it usually happens much more piecemeal than that over the course of the journey. And probably the best way to illustrate this to you is to take you through some examples in both my own life and perhaps some of my friends that I've also seen make changes and show you how people and environment has changed as new habits and behaviors were built. So the first example I'll go through is me and my fitness. Now, if I go back 2 years ago, let's, let's even call it kind of like 2, yeah, probably 2 or 3 years ago, I really struggled with my fitness and my health. I struggled to adopt the behaviors, the health habits that I wanted to have in my life. I wasn't able to get my act together and train consistently. And I had an incredibly bad behavior— sorry, relationship with food. And I ate a lot of bad processed food and I just found it hard to eat good, healthy foods. Now, if I fast forward to today, I am the opposite. I am, for the most part, sticking to 7 foundational health habits extremely consistently every single month. I am training 5 to 6 times a week and I'm active almost every single day. Week in, week out. I find it actually really quite easy now. And from an eating perspective, my whole foods percentage is usually above 70% now, and I have a much healthier relationship with food. Now, that's a gigantic change to make over the course of 2 to 3 years. And if I go back and think about the people in my life, there has been quite a big change. So when I was struggling to train consistently, I was going to a CrossFit gym and there was a great coach there called Jamie who would teach me in the session, but then I wouldn't hear much from him outside of those sessions. Obviously, I'm just going to the gym and he's training me while I'm there. Fast forward to today and Jamie is my personal trainer and every single week I am exchanging notes with him. I'm getting ideas from him. He lays out all of my programming. You know, I can now consider him a close friend, seeing as I'm talking to him so much and he plays a much bigger part in my life. And that's definitely made quite a big change to how I'm able to now consistently stick to my training and eat better and have better habits. Another good example is I have two good friends in my life, one called Rich and one called Barry, and they are both on exactly this, or they have been going through exactly the same type of journey with their own health and fitness. And there probably isn't a day that goes by that I'm not sending them a voice note. We're exchanging texts and calling each other and now and again seeing each other, etc. And they play a much bigger part of my life and I am talking to them so much more than I was probably 3 or 4 years ago. And again, that has— these are, these are people that have come closer to me and have had and have made it a lot easier. To make changes in my life when it comes to my health and my fitness and my habits. And then there are a bunch of other people on the sort of peripheral who are a little bit closer to me who are also interested in health and fitness and like-minded. They're not at the level of closeness as like Rich and Barry and Jamie, but I think even subconsciously they have sort of become a little closer to me because I know that we're like-minded and we share the same goals and we're going through the same journey. So again, Jamie being in my life, Rich, Barry, my other friends, you can see that the people around me has actually changed fairly significantly over the last 2 or 3 years. And what that means is that you have people around you who you're able to share ideas with, be inspired by, they help hold you accountable, and hopefully I'll do the same for them as well. So that's just a good example of how the people in my life have changed fairly significantly that has helped me make big changes to my health, my fitness, my habits and behaviors, et cetera. The other example I'll give is actually with my friend Barry. Like me, he struggled with his relationship with alcohol for quite a long time. And like me, he also managed to give up after trying to give up for probably many years. I think alcohol was a problem in his life for a long time. And I know that he went through a journey of probably 1 or 2 years of trying to get it out of his life and trying to give up and trying to moderate it. And it just wasn't working. Just really struggling to make that change. And it's interesting to note that people in his life now that he's, what, a year and a half sober, have actually changed fairly significantly. So one of those is me. Again, you know, I've, I went through the same journey. I gave up about a year and a half before him. And we, I think I was pulled closer into his life, particularly around the alcohol topic. Which helped him make some of that change. I'm sure, I'm sure he would say that if asked. Another good example is that he built a relationship, uh, once he was sort of half on his journey, or maybe even like a quarter into his journey. He built a relationship with a good friend that he met at a boxing club called Manny, who actually ended up living with him for the best part of a year in his loft. Um, sounds strange, but that happened. And again, Manny was really into being active, boxer. You know, he, he lived, he lives good habits. He didn't, I don't think he drank at all, but if anything, he hardly ever drank. But I'm pretty sure he was also sober. So this was an incredibly good influence on Barry and somebody that Barry literally brought into his home to live with him, which I don't think he probably actually even realized that subconsciously that may have been him pulling somebody in that he knew would be good for his life. Even though I think he did it initially because he wanted to help him in other areas. But actually, you know, money was able to give him a lot of value on his journey of giving up alcohol, I suspect. And then the other thing is that in the last year or so, he's invested in a retreat type place and built a relationship with the person who runs that retreat and actually now has built a whole new community around him of people that like to do cold swims and yoga and and martial arts and all of these types of things. And wouldn't you know it, the people that are in that type of group either tend to not drink or they're certainly not drinking when they're doing those types of things, right? So look at the people in Barry's life. Like when he was struggling to give up alcohol, the people that he would hang around with were people that would like to drink, people that were in the pub. Fast forward, I'm closer to him. He's had the benefit of being very close to Maddie. And he also now has a whole new set of people around him at his retreat. So you can see that the people in his life drastically changed over the course of 1 or 2 years. And I suspect that made a massive difference to him being able to give up alcohol versus really struggling to before. And again, in both of the examples with me and Barry, like me with my health and fitness, Barry with his giving up alcohol, the changes in people didn't happen all at once. They happened over a number of years. They happened a step at a time and we didn't necessarily know the people to bring into our life or to change or the people to move away from. It just happened fairly organically. So, you know, you don't need to decide all of these things at once. You don't need to make massive changes and cut people out. You just need to start being more conscious of the people that you might want to be spending less time around. And you want to be more quite conscious of the people that you want to be spending more time around. And if you do that, you will find yourself with, you know, around quite a different set of people after that has helped you make that change. So yeah, there's two good examples. So that's obviously a very long way of saying if you want to make a big change in your life, you've got to look at the people around you and you've got to start moving away from people that are not going to help you make that change. You've got to start bringing new people into your life that will help you make that change. Now let's move away from people and get on to the second factor, which is environment. And these are smaller examples and they're all related to me, but I think they help illustrate how a change in environment can help you build a new habit or behavior or actually make quite a transformative change in your life a lot easier. So the first one is with me and my relationship with food. I have always struggled with my relationship with food. I am prone to binge eating. I have an incredibly sweet tooth. And what this basically means is that I was, I have always struggled with eating lots of chocolate, lots of bad food, and just generally overindulging in food that's not great for me in general. And definitely also this happened a lot in the house, which is where I spend most of my time. So one of the changes I made to my environment is I took every type of bad food that I was tempted by, chocolate, sweets, biscuits, those types of things, and I put them in a big black box that has two padlocks on it. And the padlocks have a combination on them. And The only people that know the combination is my wife and my daughter. And what this means is that these things are just not around me. When I open my cupboard, what I see is either things that don't tempt me that probably are fairly bad foods as well. So things like crisps and little bars and cereals. I'm not tempted by those things. It's more of a sweet tooth that I suffer from., or I just see healthy foods that I like. And I literally don't have access to the bad foods that are easy to pick on and graze on when you're at home. And this made a gigantic difference to how much I was binging and eating those foods on a day-to-day basis. It really was night and day from bringing that black box in. And then actually more recently, I've realized that the locks actually don't properly secure the black box because you can still lift up the side of it. Don't ask how I know that. But no, no, I think I was, I was getting something out and I didn't know the combination for my door and I thought it might be open, but it wasn't. But I kind of realized you could lift the box up. But still, I don't find myself hardly ever tempted to go into that box because even the changing environment of and then being in the box, it's a much bigger leap to start trying to open a locked box to get bad foods than it is them just being around you. Right. So that was one change I made to my environment that actually really quite drastically changed my relationship with food and helped me eat a much higher percentage of whole foods. It's a lot easier nowadays. Another thing with my environment is my training. When I was training at the CrossFit gym, I did find it fairly hard to be consistent and I would miss sessions. The gym is only a 5 to 7 minute drive for me, but like, you know, in the winter it's a hassle to get up and get dressed and get in the car and scrape ice from the car and get to the gym and wait outside while the trainer turns up and blah, blah, blah. And you know, it takes the best part of 15 to 20 minutes either side to basically get to the gym and get back again. And over the last couple of years, I've been training in my home gym. So I built a home gym in my double garage, and I love training now. I know that I only have to walk 15 steps and I'm in my own space that I have curated exactly how I want it. I like to train by myself. So Making that change to my training environment means I am now able to train 5 to 6 times a week consistently, and I really like doing it. And the friction is so much less than having to get into a car and go to a gym and, you know, etc., etc. So that kind of change I made to my training environment made it so much easier to be consistent with my training. And the last example is my Yeti water bottle. Always struggled to be consistent with drinking enough water and staying hydrated. And now it's probably one of my easiest health habits that I stick to. And, you know, before I used to drink glasses of water and I think in my head I'd probably need about 8 or 9 of them to get my 3 liters, or I would just drink from like random bottles, etc., that I didn't really care for. And I know it sounds really silly, but my Yeti water bottle is an expensive bottle., and it's a 1-liter bottle, and it's just because it's expensive, it's just really nice to hold and fill it up, and it's just a nice high-quality water bottle. And I like filling it up. I just have to drink 3 of them. It's nice and easy to remember. And just like the experience of drinking water is a lot nicer drinking out of my beautiful high-quality Yeti water bottle that I invested a decent amount of money in versus crap bottles or just random glasses. So making that change has just made it easier and nicer to drink more water. And as a result, you know, struggling like 1 or 2 years ago, I used to struggle to drink enough water, often only drinking 1 liter at best. And now it's a breeze to drink 3 liters of water a day. In fact, this is my second bottle. It's half 1. I'll drink another bottle by like 4 or 5. 3 liters again today, really easy. So it's another change to my environment I made that helped me stick to a habit. Oh, and just kind of one other example actually, which is potentially one of the best examples of an environment, is going back to Barry and the fact that he gave up alcohol is that one of the big things for him was to not go to the pub. And I know it sounds super simple, right? You know, but, you know, not going to the pub was just such a big first step that he made. I just will not walk through that door and be in that environment where obviously you want to drink alcohol. And he tried to stop drinking alcohol and drinking zeros in that environment, and it didn't work, right? Only when he pulled himself out of that environment did it work. And you know what step that led to, um, which he didn't know it would lead to? He started spending more time at the boxing gym, um, because he had to fill that time with something different. And then being around the boxing gym and stuff like that has led him to build a community and invest in a retreat. So he didn't necessarily know he was going to make those drastic changes to his environment, But today he's spending time in the boxing gym doing cold plunges. He's spending time in his yoga community. And all of that came from just stop going to the pub. And you can see how the environment for him changed an awful lot along the way. So I hope that that has given you a good example of how you have to make changes to the people in your life and you have to make changes to your environment if you want to bring new behaviors and habits into your life, or if you want to make any type of transformative change in your life. So the takeaway would be, I want to encourage you to think about the people around you, and I want you to think about the environment that you have around you. And if you're, you know, whatever change you're trying to make in your life right now, think about those two things and think about a tweak that you can make to the people in your life or a tweak that you can make to the environment. And I think what you will find is it will allow you to be better at that new habit, at that new behavior, that new change you want to make. And what that will do is that will lead to other changes in people and their environment that perhaps you're not able to necessarily see right now, that will only go on to take the new habit and the behavior they're trying to build to a whole new level. And again, just a reminder, it doesn't need to be gigantic because one small subtle change will tend to lead to another. And then that will lead to another. And then before you know it, you've actually made quite big changes to the people in your life and the environment around you. And as a result, you will have new habits, new behaviors in your life, or you will have created a massive change in your life. So yeah, people and environment, think about those two things, and I hope that helps.