Ep. 17 Habits

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Hello friends. You are listening to the all things good for your podcast. I'm your host, Brian Bowen, founder of.

Integrative Health, Inc. And I'm Amy Christensen, your co host and creator of Amy Christensen Health and Wellness Coaching.

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Good morning, Brian.

Good morning, Amy. How are you doing?

I'm so good. How are you?

Just recovering from this little head cold. So sorry about my amazing voice here, but I'm ready to rock and roll.

Got the nice, raspy, sexy voice on. Good.

I appreciate that. Thank you very much. I should cut an album real quick while I got this.

The Christmas album. It's December. Happy December.

Yeah. Happy December. Yeah. I'm getting my, getting my December morning. Changing my personal morning routine up a little bit for December. So ready to rock and roll. Get geared up for the new year.

Yeah. Yeah. Tis the season to kind of be reflective and look at how you're living your day and what you do and what our automatic processes are. You know your automatic processes are.

I know what some of them are, but I'm going to do a deep dive and do an inventory on. I think there's so many little things in the shadows that you don't see. So I'm going to do a deep dive and have some reflection on that.

So make friends with the shadows.

That's true. Makes sense. So many shadows shed light. Darkness. Darkness can't live in the presence of light. Right.

So that's right. And our automatic behaviors and choices that we don't always pay attention to are our habits. Right. What are our habits?

That's right. Well, that's a good thing. We have habits. So lots of cool stuff around habits.

And one good habit to start. Radha. One good. Look, I jumped right into it. One habit that I'm learning Develop is to not label something good or bad, but to rather change our frame of reference to them in our brain as productive or unproductive, helpful or non helpful. So we have a tendency, you know, if you say something's bad to shame and guilt and avoid right off the bat. We have an automatic fear process that pops up that has us kind of avoid it and our self sabotagers jump in right away. So if we start looking at our habits, what we do every day, right? Like what are our habits? Habits is something that you do without actually, you know, function functioning like stopping and thinking through it. It's just an automatic process. We do it all the time, right? You have, you have automatic habits for every single thing you do throughout the day, for the most part, right. Our brain does that for a reason because it becomes less energy consumption and allows us to pay attention to other things. So we all have habits and we just have to look at those habits and find out that you find out if are they truly helpful and productive for the type of person you need to be.

There's a Native American story about having two wolves inside of us. And these wolves feed off of our thoughts and habits and things that we put into our mind and behaviors that reinforce that. And one wolf feeds off of negative thoughts and thought patterns and fear and you know, some of the darkness and worry and so forth. And the other wolf feeds off of positive energy and joy and things that support our growth and so forth. And so the question is, what wolf, wolf are you feeding?

No, that's an excellent one. And you have to look at that. I think, you know, we have to. But you have to start off with also you, you don't. You have to take the time, and we've talked about that, you have to take the time to figure out what do you want. If you don't have clarity on what type of life or person you want to be or show up as, you're going to have a really hard time reflecting on your habits in general. Like you can look at how you live your day, but if you don't know what the example is, what you want to be, then you're not going to recognize habits that need to change. And luckily we have this lovely world of connectedness that we have if we use it correctly. And you can see examples and connect with people all the time. I know that for me growing up, I had examples of habit and habits were built from those lessons and examples of what you saw and what you lived. Whether it was the way you think about money, the way you think about health, the way you think about relationships and success. They're examples that are shown to us every day. And that's typically how we build our habits, is what we've seen, what we've kind of taken in as truth, right?

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As I got older and moved away and I had other examples shown to me where I could say, oh, I see that there are some different way to do this and I see that it's real and doable by these other people or this person or what have you. I see that they're doing it. This isn't just a story on tv, it's on make believe. It's real. I can do this if somebody else can do this. So then you're able to kind of build this identity that you would like to have and make changes and then choose what you want to do to build habits to be that person. I like James Clear says in Atomic Habit, every action is a choice for who you want to be. And I would say every action is a choice for how you want your life to be. So everything you choose, and we do choose how we respond or what we interact with every day to be that type of person, like some people say, you know, that person made me mad or that incident made me mad. No, there was just anger with inside of you that you allowed to surface in a certain way. You chose to have something make you mad. You chose to react in a certain way. Again, reflecting back on our anger podcast, anger is not a bad thing. It's just data and feedback. It's how you choose to express it, right? So how are your habits around that? But anyway, that's not entirely another thing.

I liked about what James Clear. There was another quote I wrote that he said habits are like little atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement. I like that little, little saying too. I know that, you know, there's so much good information and there's the one Thing about habits that seems pretty consistent, like you said, is they have an automatic component to it. There's a repetition component to it, and then there's motivation component to it. The author of the Power Habit, he has four components, kind of the anatomy of a habit, if you will. The first one is the cue, something that signals you to begin engaging in the habit. The second is routine, the thing you do. Most people think of a habit as only one being routine, but the routine can be understood without knowing the context in which it happens and what motivates you to do it. The third is reward, something you get as a result of the routine, which reinforces your behavior. And finally the craving that drives your desire for the reward. So one of the homework assignments from his book and also on a website that has some information called goinhybrow.com is to take the habits called the habit loop. And you're going to take the habit and identify each one of those components. So identify the cue, identify the routine, identify the reward, and identify the craving. So another, another way to like, really, I feel like we don't a lot of times get a deep visceral sense of why we want to change a habit or why we want to create a habit. So to really dig deep into it and understand all the components to it and understand the life that feeds it, the motivation that feeds it. I think the more clarity, like you said, we don't have a lot of clarity. The more clarity we have around why we want to do something or why we want to stop something. And understanding the smaller pieces of it, I think can empower us and make it much more understandable and digestible to really accomplish.

Right. And touching back on you reminded me of a story that Dr. Cobb, he's the creator of Z Health and that's a neuromuscular facilitation type neuro retraining program that I went through. He's brilliant, really. So much great information. But he talks how the states of change. And he gave an example of somebody he worked with that came in with him and needed to improve their health and their nervous system response to a couple of things. And one of the things that came up in that timeframe was that he was a smoker. They addressed a lot of other things, but the guy wasn't ready to address the smoking. He just literally was like, nope, I'm not changing that. So of course, Dr. Cobb just let that go and worked on some other things. But with physical performance, there was a level that he was going to be blocked at because of the smoking a year or so later, I don't remember the specifics of all the stories, but he came back and he said, so let's talk about that smoking. And what had changed is he had had a baby or he was about to have a baby. So his why wasn't big enough for himself to let go of smoking. For him and his own health and own performance, it wasn't that important. I mean, yes, he wanted to get better, but it was more important than his need to be that, that, that, that smoking habit. But his why became much more important when it was going to affect a child. So you have to get in and look at where is your self value, where is your worth, what motivates you? Obviously, like from moms and dads, like, it's easy for us to be more motivated when we're providing or protecting and leading our family. So we have to look at the what's your true motivation for wanting the change or having this habit change? And then go even deeper. And I always, always point out to the five whys, like ask yourself why five times. Like ask why you want to stop this whatever habit and go in deeper and deeper. And usually there's a really deep core space or core need or core fear that you are wanting to or needing to address to even be able to approach a successful habit change. I mean, that we're talking like big habits, right? Obviously, if you want to just wake up five minutes earlier, half an hour earlier, right? There's some things you can easily do to make that happen. And then it doesn't have to be. When we talk about habit changing, it doesn't have to be world shattering changes for everybody. Some people do well with cold turkey changes like, boom, I'm done. This is it. I've made this change. What was the policy analogy? We were talking about this podcast and we were talking about things like what was it? There was something hilarious and I was like, oh my gosh, you have to say this.

There's always something hilarious in our podcast. So I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, it was like pressing a hot stove, right? You learn that lesson really quick to break that habit as a little kid or whatever. You had to have you had to an experience that like was very poignant, very severe that you made a new habit change of I will never touch that stove again. Right. And it was the tiger.

Like you tiger.

Yeah, yeah, reference. And you're like, when was the last time you were chased by tigers?

We need some new, some modern, updated References here. Get rid of the tiger analogy. Yeah. What you're saying though, I just want to throw this in there because, you know, going into changing habit, I still feel like there's a lot like three quarters of the things we do on a daily basis is unconscious driven patterns and habits that we do. And so one, like going back to the word used earlier is clarity is. I think we need to stop and like do a inventory, if you will, on the little things we do. Like, you know, because if we're trying to be. One of the reasons why we want to change a habit is to become energy efficient. Right? Because if we're more energy efficient, we have more willpower to do things. We, you know, optimize our opportunities. I mean there's, you know, we have to understand why we want to do things, but I think to take an inventory some of the habits that we do and then go into the why. Because sometimes I just think that we're so automatic with all the things that we do that there's just lack of clarity about the fact that we're even doing these things. So first identify those unconscious driven patterns. Like you said, some of them are going to be really easy to change. Right. And then some of them are going to be bigger things and then go into the why of it. But I do still feel like there's just a, we're operating from this automatic response, you know, driven thing. So like how can we, how can we stop and do an inventory and get more clarity?

Yeah, well, and I think it comes from the last several decades of not that I mean just go, go, go, go, go. Right? The constant go, the constant do this. We've glorified the 80 hour work week and the work exhaustion and just we've put that so high in a, in a norm that, that we don't. People don't take time to self analyze. People don't take time. I think, you know, obviously now more and more people are, I think we live in a state and in an area that maybe focuses on that a little bit more prevalently, but balancing and understanding. Some of the best and most highest performers and most successful people aren't working 70 and 80 hours anymore. They're recognizing the importance and the benefit of slowing down, having gratitude, meditation, sleeping well, five hour work days, four hour work days, leaving work at work. Those people are the ones that are actually becoming more successful, more healthy, more happy and more productive. And we're just learning how to start to implement more of these into our life because we don't want to have the old factory mentality where if you worked 17 hours or whatever, that showed more productivity. We are wanting to live healthier, longer lives. We don't necessarily want to retire and quit and just go sit around at 65 and 70. We want to live happily and enjoy life from our 30s on to 100. So how do we make these shifts? One of the things that brought this podcast up for you and I is that it was. We get overwhelmed with the idea of how to make a change and implement habit. And it doesn't take that much. So meditation was one of our first conversations about that. Right? And I'm terrible at meditation. My brain's always going. I have so much happening. I have a dog. I have an Aussie dog who literally rarely sits still for more than five minutes. You know, how do we, how do we use meditation? I can't sit. I just. Brian, I cannot sit still and take 10 minutes to just sit here.

Okay, I'm going to call you out real quick because this is a great. This is a great opportunity because we have different type of habits, right? And so we have actionable habits, we have thought habits, we have social habits. So you just spit out a thought habit. You're feeding. Which tiger are you feeding right now? So when you say I can't sit there for 10 minutes or I'm not good at the meditation, so that's feeding that other tiger that we don't want to feed. Right? So that's a thought habit. So how many times have you told yourself that?

I may have set us up for that, but we do, and it's very right, we do. So it doesn't. I can, I can choose to meditate and I don't. Guess what, I don't actually have to be a perfect meditator at 10 minutes starting off, I can start meditation for one minute a day, and you definitely can carve out one minute of the day. You can meditate on the toilet.

Yes, you can. You know, that's nice. That goes back to our last podcast or. No, the podcast before that, when we were, when we were going over the PQ reps and stuff like that. How, you know, instead, that's a one minute or two mini, two minute thing that goes into that compounding effect that we talked about tying into longer components of meditation. So you know exactly what you're saying. You can do that for one or two minutes and then, you know, we're going to talk about the compounding effect of what that, what that does over a period of time. But once you know you can do it and you get the reward if you were to break down the habit loop. So you, your first component is the cue. So what's going to cue you to do that? Your second component would be the routine. So maybe you do that four times a day after you go to the bathroom or while you're in the bathroom. The third is the reward, the fact that you did it, you felt good about yourself for doing it. And then the next one is the final one's the craving. So just a little example of stitching that together.

No, I like that. And then we can go from there. Okay, let's. It doesn't have to be meditation. It can be anything. But we're just using meditation because it's kind of just an easy consistency thing to work with. Right? So let's say, let's say you do believe in meditation or you see the research that's coming out and you recognize, okay, I, and I think you have to start with this, like the why, Okay, I. I need to have more distressing in my life. You have to one value that. You have to see that I want to be a person who manages my stress level. I want to be healthier, I want to be more clear and I want to be more productive. And I know that meditation has proven to help with that. Right. You have to believe that first it's.

A lot of good whys.

Okay. And then you're going to say, I want to meditate daily. Because we know that doing something more consistently daily adds up over time to allow you to have bigger impact later. We can talk more about that. And then you can start to say things like, I am a meditator. I function well, I do meditation. Right. Start putting that into your day. Okay, well, if I am a person that meditates, what does that look like? If I'm not a meditation person that can do 10 minutes a day, I can only do, let's say two minutes. I meditate two minutes every morning. This is just a setup of how you can implement a new habit. You can pick anything. I meditate for two minutes every morning. I'm going to set an alarm on my phone and it's not going to be the air horn. Who wakes up to that, for crying out loud? It's gonna be like, there's several nice music. You can even pick your own song and you can set it for a two minute song. You can set it for, I think, what, on iPhones, the alarms go off for like, is it 10 minutes or 8 minutes or something? Like the alarm continues to go. Well mine is a nice, relaxing, happy, calm wake up. So one of the things I could do set my phone across the room.

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Drive where I can't reach it. And in the morning when the alarm goes off, I will sit up in my bed and I will meditate for two minutes. Maybe you can do the whole 10 minute. Because I think it goes for, like I said, 10 minutes. And then when I'm done, when that alarm stops sounding, I will get up and start my day. Then, boom. If you do that consistently five days a week, seven days a week, you will find in a couple of weeks that it becomes extremely normal for your day. And then you'll probably find you're going to go longer and longer. You will still see results. If you only see do meditation for two minutes a day in the morning. Great.

That's a good point. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm just. Those are just little simple ways. You've stacked it with something else. You've made it convenient. IPhone in the bedroom. You're probably waking up every day anyway.

Hello.

Hopefully you're stacking with another habit that you already do. You're doing an I will statement like I will when my alarm goes off, do this thing. And then you're just doing a small, small incremental changes so it's not impacting, it's not throwing your day off. You don't feel like you're having to rearrange your entire life. So you're much more likely to do it.

Absolutely. And the patience part of that is important too. I think you have doing things in small incremental amounts. I think in the compounding effect they talk about this too, is that we have to have patience. Like little changes you might not notice. And Then you keep making those little changes and over a period of time, you know, all of a sudden that's when you see the results. And so just patience, a little more patience needs to be exercised on a regular basis when we're doing this, doing that, to really see the results in the long run.

Right? Yeah. And just having empathy with yourself, like catching yourself. Sabotage. Right. Though if you mess up or you missed a day and you start saying, well, I tried that, it didn't work, that's you accepting the I can't. That's you allowing a deeper subconscious belief pattern to override what you truly want, which is really, if you want something, that's really who you are, not your deeper subconscious level. There's a conflict there. So if you want to say you want to build strength or you're going to lose a little weight or get a little healthier, you don't have to buy a gym membership and get the running clothes, get the running shoes, or say, I have to be in the gym for 45 minutes to an hour and I have to do it six days a week. You don't have to do it. It does not have to start that way. I mean, obviously you're already doing those things. If you're somebody who struggled with having a consistent workout program, then it doesn't have to be that. It can be. I will do 25 squats. If it's 10, it's 10, if it's 5, it's 5. Not the point. Pick a number that works for you. I will do 25 squats during every commercial break. Do we still have commercial breaks? Into the workspace. Hey guys.

Hey, it's Brian. I just wanted to take a pause for a moment in the middle of.

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I think.

So every commercial breaks. I'm just surreal. 25 spots. Why?

I don't. Somehow Alexa was wanting to answer that question for me.

That's great. You can always ask Alexa for advice. Actually, since that just happened, there's another person or another person, another technology that you can utilize that you can have her signal you throughout the day to do certain things. So if you wanted to set a timer for every 90 minutes while you're working, you can have that happen on your phone. You can have your. I won't say your name because then she's going to join us again, but you can have her.

I unplugged her. She's done.

Okay, so you can have Alexa do something for you. Anyway, back to My example is 25 squats during a commercial. Or set an alarm on your phone that goes off every 90 minutes. Or every time I return from the restroom before I go back to work at my desk, I will do 25 squats. And if you're doing that by the restroom, you're doing that by the restroom. Or you're doing every 90 minutes. Let's say you're doing 25 squats four times during your day. That's 100 squats. You do that five days a week. That's 500 squats a week and 2,000 squats a month.

I'm gonna have amazing quads and butt after that. I can't wait to do that.

And you're stacking it. So obviously you're. And you're getting rest days. And obviously if you're really good at that and you wanted to start adding weight or resistance bands, you can have. You can have a little hand weights at your desk or resistance band at your work desk. If you're still working in an office, there are little incremental changes that you can do that stack up over time. And it's the consistency and the incremental layering. I'm trying to remember what I was trying to say. Brian, say it better for me, please.

No, you got it. And again, those thought habits. To go back to that for a second. I think what you said about being able to be patient with yourself and forgive yourself, hit the reset button with some of this stuff. Because I think that sometimes our old experiences of trying to change things didn't work. So therefore, we carry that forward to. I've tried that before. I can't do that. It's. We've had. We build our experience from that, and all of a sudden that becomes a habit that we tell ourselves, which is feeding the nasty tiger that we don't want. So make sure, you know, you stop reset. We had a great podcast on mindset and reframing. It's a good time to go back and listen to that one before you set your new habit, go into it with a new mindset, reframe it. Right. Don't feed the nasty thought viruses. And then knowing again the kind of anatomy and the big. Like Amy was saying, the whys, and really get to the visceral experience of why you want to do it and get the motivation and the will and the power and really understanding the clarity is going to be huge for success.

Yeah. And there are some, like, we've mentioned a couple of things. So the Atomic Habits is one of the books that we've referenced, the Power of Habit and the Compounding Effect. And then you have another one written though Tiny Habits. So we've kind of referenced all of those are great books to read or listen to to kind of hone in more abilities for building habits. I particularly have enjoyed Atomic Habits. And one of the ways that he recommends. James Clear recommends creating a good habit is he's got four laws. The first law is make it obvious. So whether you're kind of giving yourself cues, like make it an obvious thing, like if you want to drink more water. I think one of the examples in his book is like, you know, move the soda drinks. If you drink sodas, stop it. If you drink sodas, push those to the back and put your water up front. Or, you know, place water around where it's easily or more obvious to get. Second law was make it attractive. You know, create a motivation, ritual, or do something you enjoy immediately before or after a difficult habit. Right. So join a culture like running clubs, that kind of thing. I mean, I started running because I was not a good runner. I mean, not a good runner. Still not a good runner. But I Ended up running half marathons because I went to joined a running club when I moved to Colorado and in downtown Colorado Springs because it was on a Tuesday night and you ran a 5K and then you came back and had $2 beer and at the time it was free spaghetti and salad. Yeah.

So carb baby.

It was great. I totally ran for beer and friendship. So we had a great community of people. But consistency over time. I started running longer and longer distances and doing more and more harder runs. So I enjoyed the people and I enjoyed the beer.

So what about this spaghetti?

You know, I'm sure the spaghetti was great too, but really early, trust me, it was really more about friendship and beer. Way more than spaghetti. All right then the third law is make it easy. Right? So reducing the friction priming your environment do a two minute rule kind of thing like we were just talking about. Like okay, you're going to want to. You want to go to the gym. He gives an example of a guy in the in the book where he goes to the gym, he makes it easy. He puts it. He goes to the gym right on his way to work and he didn't even do anything. He just preset a bag up the night before, put his gym clothes in there and went to the gym and just walked in, stood there for two minutes and left. That's how he started his progress towards eventually losing £100 and keeping it off for years. So setting himself up. If you want to get up and work out in the morning, have your clothes ready, set your gym bag out, have your protein shake ready to go. Look at the ways you self sabotage and have that a challenge for yourself. But make it easy.

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Drive and then like we said it only if it's only one or two minutes then just be one or two minutes and then the fourth law is make it satisfying. So reinforcement giving yourself an immediate reward when you've completed a habit. I mean if you're trying to lose weight, please don't go to the exercise. Go do exercise and then eat a burger or donuts afterwards. Like give yourself like maybe a different type of reward. But you can also like again, I think make it easy and make it attract or make it satisfying. Make it attractive. Tend to overlap a little bit. For me, like going to running club, it was make it attractive and make it satisfying. Right. Because I had friendship and beer. Who doesn't want that? So those are his four ways, like the obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. So there's some different ways you can set yourself up to win for incorporating new habits and lifestyles.

So I love that. And a lot of these again have a lot of overlap. So BJ Fogg, behavioral scientists at Stanford, he's the author of Tiny Habits. His there's some overlap again. So his is start with a small specific action. Pick a trigger anchor. Just like in Charles Duhigg. He had the Q is one of the anatomy components of a habit. Then temptation bundling. So you either hear about people like Brendan Burchard talks about hooking a habit to another habit or bundling one or folding it in. So there's these kind of different ways of looking at it. Slide a good habit into that space occupied by Pad one. Redesign your environment, which is something you cued into earlier about just making it keeping things simple. So if you want more fruit, make sure you have fruit setting out everywhere. So really obvious stuff. And then the biggest thing that I still like, we did a podcast on is celebrating your wins. And so I think you mentioned there's that reward component just like in Charles Duhigg's as well as atomic habits. So a lot of these have the same kind of components to it, which, you know, I appreciate. So even though there's a lot of information and can be overwhelming, just remember a lot of them are supporting, supported because they all have been proven to work with the same theories.

How do you again, we've talked about this from the beginning. You got to take some time to reflect on your day. Every one of these books and any high performance successful coach, they all very, very much stress tracking. So and I think that ties into being just aware. And of course, when you say tracking, a lot of people start to like panic or freak out. I'm not doing more work.

And I just remind Journal journal.

But hey Siri, you have a quick little phone that you can talk to. And I know I reference iPhone because that's what I use, but I think all of them do it. You can do the Google thing too, right? You can literally just talk to Your phone and start making a note. Hey, Siri, make a note. I'm doing this today. Or I ate this today, or I drank this today, or hey, I just had this negative. I just realized I had this kind of thought today. You can. It's that easy. Oh, yeah, my. My iPhone is making a note as we're.

Oh, that's funny. I use an app called Strides, and they're not sponsoring this podcast by any. By any means. I believe mine is free, but it's cool because you can put in. You can create it. They have a lot of templates in there, but there's different ways when you put the habit in, if you want to mark it by percentage of completion or how many reps a day or whatever. So that's really good. But I would still always stress before you start tracking a habit is really understanding the recipe of what you're trying to do and get really clear about it. So I typed up a quick little thing. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it's a habit recipe, so clarity is one of it. And it's really just get as clear as possible about what you want to quit, what you want to start. The clearer you are about it digs deeper and anchors itself into that subconsciousness. So we want to really drill this in to our subconsciousness. And the more clear our mind is about all of this, that's going to start anchoring it in there. So it's going to make the whole thing easier and easier, even on a scale of 1 to 10, how much you want to change or start this habit or stop a habit, like, be really clear about what it is and then go into like, what Amy was saying, the why, what are the benefits? And then understanding that compounding effect and knowing that it's going to be patient. There's a fun game called the Flash Forward, where you flash forward into the future. What do you look like and feel like? What's it look like and feel like if you stop or start this habit? And how's it affecting your future? So really how you can kind of see what that compounding effect would be if you did. Did something or didn't do something. And there's more detail on that if we want to post it. Remember, keep it simple. Naturally, we avoid friction.

And.

And that's why these things are automatic. There's not a lot of thought put in, you know, not a lot of emotions and stuff put into it. So keeping it as simple as possible. So to avoid friction when creating the habit, as much as possible. And so, and so saying no to many things many times a day will help kind of build up that muscle to our neuroplasticity. Creating energy. I just said I wasn't going to say this whole thing, but I'm jumping into it real quick. I'm just gonna go quick. But creating more energy. So create space in your life to have the energy to form these. So start just looking at little things that are draining your energy that you can easily just shut the light switch off to. So the more space and energy you can create by getting rid of stuff that's draining energies is helpful. And fifth one is reps. It's all about the reps. Just like studying something new, building muscle. The more reps we do drills that pattern into our subconscious perception brain. And then the last part is just courage. You gotta dig deep for it and like what's the worst case scenario if I do or don't do this, but find the courage to do that. So before you start tracking anything, whether it's this little habit recipe or whether it's looking at the four components of the habit loop, like really viscerally understand and see your objective, see your target, feel it, see what it. Imagine what it would feel like if you were doing it. Imagine what it feels like if you didn't do it. Like the more you, the more clear you are about it, the more the subconscious mind is going to anchor that in and the easier it's going to be. That's my hoopla.

I like it. And yeah, absolutely it's starting with your why, getting clear, starting with why visualizing and seeing yourself in that process. It's also lots of great science that backs that up. There's lots of research that shows how important visualization are. I mean some of our greatest athletes use it on a daily basis and to improve and work on their basics. Right. What is it say about. I don't remember. I'm not a sports person, right. So I don't know anybody's actual names. I think they said Michael Jordan and he would go every day at 4 o' clock in the morning to practice. And I think there's a story about a journalist who went and watched. I don't remember which book this is in, but somebody went and watched Michael Jordan for practice. And he was really excited about seeing how you know all this insight and these special techniques. And he said, you know, for an hour all he did was basic free throw drills. That's it. Nothing special. And there was some great quote back from him. But it was something to the effect of, you know, when you being great isn't about having all these amazing superhero skills, it's about mastering these basic, simple things. So just practicing that consistency, and it seems monotonous, but it was the consistency of the basics that made the biggest difference for him. So I think with all of this, you know, picking the clarity in your why and not be, you know, visualizing how you want to do it, setting yourself up for success with that habit, pairing it with things that are rewarding and helpful and good cues to remember how to do it. And then the last thing you said made me think about what I'm hoping we're going to chat about in our next podcast is courage and overcoming things like fear. Overcoming fear. Like, what's the worst case scenario? What's going to happen if it doesn't happen? But how do we do these things that. How do we get the courage to make these changes? Because there are some things that inhabits in our life that are scary, that are requiring us to put ourselves in extremely uncomfortable situations. And sometimes it's just small things that are underlying fears that we just avoid. And so we continue these unhelpful habits. But finding the courage to say, yes, I can and want to change my life, even if it's just small ways, is super important. And have to be willing to be in a place to face those fears. Right.

Sounds like that's officially our next podcast, so stay tuned.

Let's do it. Face your fears. But did you die? Come on.

Sorry. Did you. Did I die?

That's the whole thing about facing your fears. I know, it was scary.

Sorry. You cut out for a minute and I muted myself so I could cough real quick. And I just heard, did you die? And I was like, did you hear me cough? I thought I muted it. I'm like, oh, wait, no, she's talking about the podcast. I got. I got it together. I got it together. It's okay.

Doing scary things always ask you, but yeah, it was hard. It was scary. But did you die?

But did you die? No. What's the worst case scenario?

And maybe it's not.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Well, that's the go that goes. Who's to say what is good fortune or what is bad fortune? That's a whole nother story, too. So I feel like we got a good start on habits for sure. Yeah.

Nobody's being chased by tigers, so we got to find other motivations. Let's get out there and if you want to make your life better, start a new habit.

That's right. But do pick something. So pick homework. Pick something that you've been thinking about, you want to change. Before you start putting together the plan too much, go into what Amy said. The why? Really look at and get clear about what it is. What does it look like in the future if you don't do this and what does it look like if you do? Just role play that out a little bit and then keep it simple what you're going to do. Hook it to that new habit. Hook it to something else. Find the joy in it. Find room where you have more energy and just remember it's all about patience and the reps. Mentally rewarding yourself too. And watch out for those viruses. Don't feed that unwanted tiger that we don't want to feed. We just want to feed that one that wants the best love and energy and joy for us. So feed that tiger.

Feed the tiger. Sticky notes are a great way to keep yourself refocused. Put sticky notes on your mirror, on your coffee maker, on your refrigerator, on your car dash. Put reminders on your phone to pop up. Use lots of ways little stickies to help reinforce those positive mind shifts and habit reminders. Well, love it Ryan. I hope our next podcast you just have your normal sexy voice and that you're feeling.

I appreciate that. Thank you. And thank you for understanding and appreciation.

Always a pleasure. Love chatting with you.

Thank you guys. Don't forget, share this podcast with as many people as you know. Share, share, share.

Thank you guys everybody. Have a fantastic day.

All right, thank you. Bye.

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