How to start your habits the fun and easy way using challenges

How to get new habits started quickly. You've probably seen this book. It is one of the most popular books on the planet around habits and how to build them. So good I've even got my own copy right here. Now I really like this book, but there are some big problems before we get there. There are infinite numbers of books on the market about improving your habits, improving your routines and all of this kind of thing. The question I want to ask is how effective has it really been for you? Has the book led to you sustaining long term habits? Now, for some of you, this book may have worked really well and that's great. This video probably isn't for you, but for those who bought the book and are not seeing the changes, we might be covering some of the problems that you're experiencing. I struggled with this and I'll be talking through my problems here. Now in this video I'm going to go over what I realized, what then worked for me, how I built a system to help others and how you can use it too. Now I focus on a couple of very specific points. There are many other areas that really works from the book, but I just want to focus on a couple of things that made the biggest difference for me in the areas that mattered in my life. There are two main problems I want to address here. The lack of accountability. It doesn't really matter how much you set your, your habit systems up. If you don't have a way to be accountable that works for you, it is going to be incredibly difficult to stay disciplined and sustain the actions you need to take to keep the habit going. The second one is boredom, and this is a bit of a strange one for some people. It's something I experienced when I would set habits up. You're quite excited with the intention at the beginning, but once you've been going for one or two days or even a few weeks, you lose that novelty and it just kind of dwindles. It doesn't kind of violently stop. It just, it just fades away. And in the next minute a few months have passed and you just remembered you were working on a habit. We're going to look at how to resolve these particular problems. So what can you do? Challenges. What is it about a challenge that can help solve this? Time pressure. Time pressure can really help us get engaged with what we're doing. It can be exciting and fun because like here got one here in my community and there's leaderboards, accountability. When, when you're part of a challenge and there's other people involved, there's a feeling of social pressure that can, that can really help us take action. You're part of something bigger. There's a community element to it. I noticed when I became part of someone else's challenge, you feel this sense of just being part of something bigger than yourself. It made me more compelled to complete the work. Finally, I just touched on the idea that a challenge can feel like a defined project, at least to start with. It has constraints around it, the time, the requirements, the scope, everything. There's rules and so it becomes a lot easier to follow. Now it is possible to create challenges for yourself. I still do this quite a bit. And it can work. It can work, but it can be very, very difficult because it's very difficult to be accountable to yourself sometimes. And we can do with some extra help and support around this. But if you do want to do it yourself, the benefits are that you can get started very quickly. You know, there's no cost, there's no setup. You can just set your plan up and get going with it. But you may find it hard, like I said, to find, to stay accountable. And it's hard to create that time pressure. If you've got, you know, weeks or months and no one's going to chase you for something, you can just keep going and you can have days off. And then those days off become one day, then becomes two days, then a week, then a month. And it's hard to create this fun and exciting element of a challenge because you're doing it by yourself. It's hard to get really motivated and feel like you're doing something meaningful. The alternative is you actually try and do it with others. When you do it with others, because you become part of this group where everyone is like minded, it can feel, it can feel quite comforting. And you start and finish challenges together. That's important, you see, and I think this is probably one of the most important ones. You get to see other people working on their goals. I remember when I started entering some challenges, when I saw other people hitting similar goals that I was working on, it lit a fire in me and made me want to work harder. There's an element of structure if you're part of a challenge, usually someone or a team has set up the challenge so you don't have to think about creating your own structure. Someone else has done it for you. If there's a reporting system, a way to stay accountable, and if it's part of a few people, it helps you to stay accountable because other people can see this, the challenge. So what I wanted to do is I noticed it worked for me. So I wanted to see whether I could create a challenge for other people to participate in and see whether it would work. So what I did is I set up, I set up a few challenges but this is the one that seemed to work the best. It's a five day challenge and it's in my community. But I'll talk about that in a bit. It's about kickstarting a habit. It can be any habit that you want. So you're trying to accumulate five days to complete in total and you submit an entry form, you get put on a leaderboard and you get to report your progress. Now I wanted to trial this just to see whether it would work based on what I experienced and to see whether I can give it to others and make it. And make it available and see whether. And see whether it would be helpful. So I posted a video the other day a couple of weeks ago and I set the challenge up. This one, you can go and watch it. And this was just before we started the challenge and so we had lots of signups for it and I didn't know how this particular one was going to go. It is the second one there. A few days later we were able to see what people were able to do. And so here we have five day challenge. I'll take you live into the file shortly. But you can see people will put their name, I put their names in. They submit an entry form in. You enter your habits and you can see the participants and sessions completed. There are none because this was a day before we started and then this is, I think it was quite a few days after, so a couple of weeks after. And so this is what people were able to achieve. And this is only a screenshot. I'll show you further down. Because not everyone completed it. That's also quite important to know. So people were able to complete their five days and they and I have a promotion system so he get promoted to the next level challenge. It is really fun. People really get involved. I'll show you how it works in a community. And my community is free by the way. So we got 19 participants sessions completed, 72 sessions which is really cool. It's really cool to see. And a lot of people here have been struggling with executing on their own habits for months, if not years. So you can see here are some examples. So there's coding, there's caffeine, there's running, content creation, business work, studying everything. And the point is it doesn't really matter what your habit is, it's that you are working toward it over a five day period. Now. It was interesting because I've run a couple of these challenges now and we, I got to post this in the community and it was all kind of capturing the wins and notable achievements. It was really, it's actually quite, it was quite fun to write because I get to reflect upon everyone who made it through various challenges. It's taken a while to get the challenges right. I've always been quite excited to do this because I know I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing. I can read a book, but I notice I don't do the exercises. I wouldn't do the challenges, the exercises in the book. Only when I was involved in other people's challenges would it seem to work on me. But it had to be the right type of challenge. If it's too difficult, I, I would then bail on it. So I've tried to create my own version of challenges for people to participate in that would work for them. So the results in this One we had 19 participants, 12 people made it, promoted to level two. Now there's a bit of an update. We actually managed to get more because we had some late joiners, which was great. Yes. In this one, 72 sessions completed. So that's 72 habit sessions or days. People have been, you know, waiting for months and months and months to get started on something and then suddenly with this little compression, this kind of 10 day window to complete five days, people seem to rise up to the challenge and it was really fun. Notable achievements. We had Chaz who wanted to work on her writing and hadn't been doing as much writing as she wanted and had a target of 400 words a day. So they got promoted from level one to level two and continued into the level two challenge but ended up and is still going to this day. So we are in the 50 day challenge now. 11,000, over 11,000 words at the time. Amazing achievement. And Kelly, who was able to use the Habit Challenge to work on her studying for her teaching qualification and then announced that she completed it and it was really aided by participating in the challenge. And this was actually a couple of last month or a month and a half ago or so. So yeah, the latest round, we have 14 participants again. I wrote this a couple of days ago. So we've actually got a lot more participants now. More sessions completed too. And we are in the middle of it. I run this every couple of weeks. Here is the progress from a couple of days. I'll show you the live one in a moment. So you get to see how this all works. Right. The next challenge. Yeah. Starts every two weeks. Lots of other challenges to get involved with and if it sounds like something that might help, just check the description or hopefully I'll put some, some links in there. So you can, you can join if you want. This is my community. If you want to do it yourself and you think you can, you get activated by these type of challenges. Now I'm the kind of person who really gets on well with these time bound challenges. I get quite excited by these things. I like leaderboards. If that is the kind of thing that works for you, especially if you play games, it's likely to work for you. You don't have to join my thing. You can go out and look for other challenges to join. This happens if you're working on hobbies and sports and anything like that too. If you join challenges things, think about how you can blend into that rather than trying to create your own thing from some of the exercises from this book. Because I see this with a lot of clients I work with, they try and create the systems that are designed and they spend so much time doing all of the planning and all of the creation on that side rather than doing the work. Whereas with the challenges you can just focus on doing the actual work right and you let someone else, you essentially outsourcing, building the structure and everything for you, someone else holding the start time, the finish time. Now it is actually quite a lot of work I noticed because when I run the challenges after a lot of checking up, but in this case I'm managing that side of things and participants can just focus on executing. Look for other communities. If you don't want to join this one, you can go and find some other ones. Look for ones that run challenges in the areas that you're trying to build your habits in. It can really, really help. I do this all the time. I still do it to this day, especially when in sports or any activities I like to do. Now let me just show you around our one. So this is, this is our community. We've got a live five day challenge running right now. So I don't want to overwhelm you too much. I'll show you. So here 5 Day Habit Challenge Level 1 Beginner with a live progress tracker. Okay, so let's jump in. So you get to see. I've got the instructions here and welcome all the participants. And what I get everyone to do is everyone's getting ready for the start. This was Nearly a week ago. Once you start, you clock in and then you say, day one, done. And you ring a bell. Because that's something I learned when I joined a challenge in another community. Ringing a bell to signal that you have completed your day. And what happens is people start to post more and more. Yeah. And you have to log in each time. So we're creating a behavioral change too. Yeah. But remember, we're focusing on someone else building the structure that is me. The reporting system all goes on in here. You do this and it all gets updated in the spreadsheet. Okay. So you can see lots and lots and lots of comments. And this was only started five days ago. Yeah. And so let's jump into the actual leaderboard. You'll see what it looks like. Right. Live leaderboard. So we've got 14 participants. It started four days ago and we've got 41 sessions completed. And we've got lots of people who are nearly approaching their completion of this challenge. So we're trying to get five day, five sessions completed. Lots of people working. So we got work, sleep routines, study sessions, exercise, investment, so various habits. But everyone's kind of working together to try and achieve and hit their goal. Now I think I just saw very briefly, we've got a few people have hit their five first five days. Yep. Here. If it wasn't for this challenge, I probably wouldn't have picked myself back up, but I did and it feels good and that's great. Right. I will respond to some of these comments shortly after this video, but I just wanted to film this quite quickly. Okay. So we've got a five day level one challenge and we've got, once you complete that, you get promoted to the level two challenge. Now I've kind of designed this in ways that I like. I like having these challenges and having easier challenges that lead on to harder challenges. And all in the context of building up your bigger goals. Yep. So a lot of people start with the five day challenge and then if you make it through, you go to a 20 day and then a 50 day. And then I've got other challenges here too. I've tried to dose it to make it feel comfortable so that it's something that you can work on. It feels challenging, but it's not overwhelming. Some people try it and something comes up and they can't complete this challenge. It's not a problem. It runs every two weeks. So then you can start again. And if you want to start building up some new habits, you can join again. There are lots of people run challenges. I have just found it being really effective and when I coach clients sometimes we will use some of the ideas from Atomic Habits and we will set a challenge between us. So obviously I coach, so I will help people. We will set the challenge weekly and work through that. So it's a lot easier because it's one on one and I can put the right amount of pressure and dose someone up with the right feeling of what needs to be achieved by each week. On a personal note, I actually work best one to one. That's like my ideal way to do it. So I usually get a lot of one to one instruction coaches, mentors and instructors. But alternatively, if you find communities or groups that have the same thing, I definitely recommend using it. Okay. Anyway, I don't want to go on too long. The summary is go and find challenges or communities, groups or instructors who can create that because you have accountability as a package and you don't have to worry about it. Someone else runs the structure and you just have to try your best and show up. Okay, so hope that was useful. If you want to join my community, check the link in the descriptions and join up and join my newsletter. That has instructions in it too. But I think I'll leave a link so you can join straight into the community. Okay, take care.