Trying to build new habits? Ask yourself these 3 questions

If you say you're going to do something for an hour every day, an hour is a long commitment. It's a big chunk of your day. And some days you might be able to commit an hour and some days you might not. So the days that you are not able to, you're just going to look and say, well, there's no point doing it because I can't commit an hour. And that's obviously not how you make change. You're listening to the Circle C Project Foreign welcome to the Triple CE Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live lifeless. I'm your host, Ryan Spence, the Big Lord, rock hat life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop and big hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat and allow me to guide you towards living a life that lives. Hello, welcome to episode 40 of the Triple C Project with your host, me, Ryan Spence, life coach and author of the Triple C Method. Gain clarity, boost confidence and build courage so you can live life lit. And if my voice is sounding a little bit funny today, it's because I feel I'm coming down with a bit of a cold. It's the winter season here in the uk, November, the temperature has definitely dropped and I gotta say I'm not loving it. When I moved to Singapore, this time of year was one of the things that I definitely knew I was not going to miss. Even though I was born here in the uk. I hate the cold. I do not do well with the cold and anyone who knows me knows that because I complain about it all the time. I always say we can't control the external, we can only control how we react to it. But the weather is one of the areas where I find it difficult to practice what I preach. Anyway, it is what it is. But I do practice what I preach in other areas. I very much a strong advocate of walking it like you talk it. I think we can always, particularly in the personal development world, people can throw around a lot of ideas, a lot of techniques, a lot of strategies, and sometimes they're not necessarily things which they have tried themselves. I mean, even if you've tried something and it hasn't worked for you, but you know, it's worked for someone, somebody else, you can still talk about it. But when you're throwing things out there because you've just heard about it and you haven't actually seen it in practice, whether on yourself or with a client or with somebody else, for me, and this is no shade anybody else, but for me, that's that, that just feels a little bit out of integrity. So anything that I talk about on the podcast, in my content, if you're a client of mine, they're all things which I've either tried myself, other clients have tried, I've seen work, and yeah, I, I share them with you because I feel that they will be of value. But as always, you take what works for you and you leave what you don't. Everything isn't for everybody. We all have different brains, different ways of thinking, different ways of doing things. But if anything that I can do can help you see things differently and just try something new and see if it works for you, that's a, that's a win for me. And that's very much what I'm going to talk about in today's episode. So there are things that we know that make us feel good. You know, that could be working out, it could be eating right, eating the right foods, it could be getting enough sleep, which is something that I struggle with. But even when we know that these things work for us, that they make us feel good, that they are healthy, that they are supportive to our well being, we don't always do them or we don't always do them as much as we should. For an example, often here in the uk, you hear when it's coming up to our summer here, people talk about getting in shape for their summer holiday, getting that bikini body, getting ready to look buff on the beach, you know, and they start to hit the gym hard. They're really hardcore about it. They have to go every day, they starve themselves, they don't follow the right nutrition plan because it's all about dropping a certain amount of weight or getting a certain amount of richness. So that when they're on holiday for that week or two weeks in the sun and they're on the beach, they, they, they in their mind look good and therefore feel good. And the thing is, sometimes they may look good, but they don't necessarily feel good because they haven't been eating right, they haven't been looking after themselves. But then they come back off holiday and it's kind of like that work was done and that's over and they fall back into old habits and they just put on any of the weight that They've lost. They start to feel how they felt before, maybe low in energy, whatever it is. And the reason is because the habits that we've got, we built up over a lifetime. And we're not going to change those habits by hitting the gym hard for two or three weeks before we go on holiday. You know, we are working towards a particular goal for that period, but we're not innately changing our habits. And that doesn't support you, just support us in the long term. This episode is a kind of a. An extension of episode 31. Consistency beats intensity. So if you haven't heard that episode, go back and listen to that one and then listen to this, and then you kind of get a bit more of a sense of what I'm talking about and how this relates. So this episode I talk about talking about meditation, but it isn't really about meditation. Meditation is just the vehicle for me to show you, to illustrate to you how I walk, what I talk, but also why I feel that consistency is a better way of changing yourself, changing your life, changing your habits, than intensity. So going back to things that are good for us, I know I'm better when I meditate. I'm calmer, I'm more relaxed, I have more clarity and I'm less snappy here. The people around me, so they benefit too. It's a ripple effect. And meditation is important to me. It has been important to me for a long time. I've been meditating for a number of years now, on and off, and whenever I do it, I always just feel I need to do this more. I need to. I want to make this a daily practice. And I would go through periods where I'd be like, yes, okay, now I'm going to meditate every day. This is going to happen. But I wanted to do it for 20 minutes. Plus 20, 30 minutes for me was like, that's a proper meditation. It was always like, what's a proper length of time for meditation? And that would be fine, but inevitably, what would happen, there'd be days that would come up when I didn't have 20 or 30 minutes, so I just wouldn't do it. And then I'd beat myself up for not doing it and I'd miss a day. That one day would turn to two, would turn to three, and then before you know it, I hadn't meditated for a week or a couple of weeks. And then I'd beat myself up and be really down on myself and not been able to maintain this. And then I come back to it and the cycle would start again. What I was trying to do is basically be intense about what I was doing. I was like, I have to do 20, 30 minutes. And you may probably experience this maybe, maybe with the gym, maybe you get into that frame of mind where okay, I have to go to the gym for an hour every single day, off I go. And you do it for a few days and then one day you wake up maybe not feeling too great, or you're a little bit busy at work or something comes up with your family and you miss it and then you think, okay, I'll go the next day and then something else stops. You go the next day and then before you it you haven't been for a week, couple of weeks, whatever, and you fall off the wagon and you don't get back on it for another few months. This is common. And what I used to do is, as I said, it's just if I didn't have time, I wouldn't do anything. So I wouldn't get any benefit at all, you know, and that really wasn't working for me. It wasn't helping me to develop a habit of meditation, of daily meditation. And so what I did a little recently is I decided that enough was enough. I decided that I was going to create a daily meditation practice because it was important to me. Because when I have so much going on now with coaching, the podcasts, the book, family and I mean, Christmas coming, all sorts of other things, it's important for me to have that time for myself to go inward and to help to gain that clarity and just to sit in stillness. Stillness is powerful. I've heard stillness referred to as a superpower before, and I think it's true. Because life is so busy, we're conditioned to always be on the go, always moving, always being productive, quote, unquote. But having that time in stillness is where we really get to know ourselves. We really get to see how we feel. We really get to build that self awareness. We notice there's little kinks and our body, the little areas of tension. We notice the mind racing. Why it's racing, what's going on, what is it focusing on? We get to question why is it focusing on that There are all of these things that happen in stillness which are integral to our well being and to allow us to function at our best, not function at our best in terms of doing more work and being more productive in that sense, but for ourselves, for what works for us, for us to have a life that's lit. So when I decided I wanted to create this daily practice. I had three key questions. And the first question to me was, okay, I've done this the old way where it's like, I had to do 20 minutes plus a day, and that wasn't working out. So it was. It was too much pressure. So the first question was, how can I make this easy? How can this be easy? What can I easily commit to? And asking this question, it had to be something where I would think about it and be like, man, that's not even worth doing, barely, because therefore I would do it right? If you say you're going to do something for an hour every day, an hour's a long commitment. It's a big chunk of your day. And some days you might be able to commit an hour, and some days you might not. So the days that you are not able to, you're just going to look and say, well, there's no point doing it because I can't commit an hour. And that's obviously not how you make change, because this up and down, this chopping and changing, this inconsistency, it doesn't help in making the change in developing a new habit. So for me, it had to be easy. It had to be something that I could easily commit to every day. So I decided, 10 minutes, I can commit to 10 minutes every day. That's really easy. Some days I can probably do more, but 10 minutes is something which I can easily commit to every day. I'm sure of that. So that's what I did. It's going to commit to sitting in meditation for 10 minutes. Then my second question was, when? When can I do this? When is a good time for me to commit to this? And it wasn't necessarily about scheduling it all in my calendar. That does work for some people. It doesn't always work for me, but it was just my mind thinking, when can I easily do this? When is a good time to get this? 10 minutes. If it is only 10 minutes of time. Because knowing when the time you're going to do something, it just means that you start to build up this trigger, it gets to that time, and you're like, oh, this is the time that I should be doing X. And then your mind slowly gets trained to the point that this is a habit. This is what you do at this time. It's like when you wake up and you have your morning coffee. You probably have your first coffee of the day around the same time every day. It's just become a habit. It's just become something that you do. And this is kind of where you want to try to get to with anything else that you're doing. And it doesn't mean that you'll always do it at the same time every day necessarily, because look, things come up, but this is where you're trying to get to. So for me, the question was, when is it easy? And it was going to be easy for me if the meditation was the very first thing that I did every day before the kids got up, before I had breakfast, before I had coffee, before I even had water. Sometimes the very first thing I was going to do was get out of bed, walk to my office, sit on the beanbag, turn on the Calm app and meditate. That was it. And that way I knew there'd be no interruptions, there'd be no way of missing it. I would have to make sure I got up in the morning to give me enough time to actually do it before everybody else got up and started distracting me. The third question, the third question that I asked myself was how long will I commit to this? How long am I going to do it? I said, I want to meditate every day for 10 minutes, but how long will I commit? Will I commit to this for? And this was an interesting, really, because there are a couple of ways which you could go about this. Now, I wanted this habit, my meditation, my daily practice, to be a non negotiable. But I also wanted to remove the pressure. I wanted to make it feel good. Because I knew from past experience that when I place this pressure on myself to do 20 minutes every day for a set period of time, the pressure was on. And I wouldn't necessarily be in the moment, I wouldn't necessarily be enjoying the practice. So I decided that this time what I was going to do is rather than commit to a time frame, I was just going to take it one day at a time. All I had to do, all I committed to myself to do, was to sit and meditate for a minimum of 10 minutes today. So when I wake up, that's what I had to do. Tomorrow was another day, tomorrow was tomorrow. And I wouldn't necessarily look ahead until tomorrow or to next week. I would just commit to sitting today. And that worked for me for this process. And it won't necessarily work for everything, but it worked for me for this process, for meditation, for this reason. Hey, I'm interrupting myself to give you this short message. Now, if you're listening to this pod, you're likely looking to change your life. Here's the thing. Transformation doesn't happen by doing what you've always done. It happens when you change your thoughts about what's possible for you. My book, the Triple C Method, helps you do that by giving you the tools and strategies to stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit. Described as a transformational toolkit and the book I wish I'd had when I decided to leave corporate the Triple C Method will change how you see yourself and how you live your life. Available now as paperback, ebook and audiobook read by yours truly. Head to iamrinespence.com book or over to your favorite bookseller to grab your copy today so you can stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit. Okay, so it worked for me because the alternative would have been to set out to meditate for 100 days. And that's cool that that could have worked. But in my mind, if I set out to meditate for 100 days and set that as a target, I probably could have done it. I may have done it, but it may also have taken the joy away and it would have skewed my intention, my reason for wanting to develop this practice. See, as I said, my intention was to develop a daily meditation practice and to recognize the benefits of that practice and to develop a deeper self awareness, a deeper inner knowing, get to know myself more deeply than I already did and create greater clarity on the vision of the life I want to live on, creating a life that's lit. But by setting this up as a challenge to hit 100 days for me, that would have changed that intention and it would have become something more competitive rather than something more contemplative. And so to my mind, I decided that I wasn't going to sit my, set myself a target. All I was going to do was commit to showing up every day for at least 10 minutes. And that's just me. That's. That's just me. With this process, there are other challenges, other habits where setting that daily target may work for you may work for me. Like for example, when I decided to try being vegetarian for 30 days. For me, doing the 30 days work because it just meant that I had something to work towards. It meant that I wasn't going to just decide, oh, this is too hard and give up. Because when I commit to something, I commit. I mean, what actually happened was that I did it for two weeks and then something, I watched a documentary and I became vegan and never looked back. So, you know, I, I guess it, it did work for me in terms of terms of focus in the mind, but for that process, setting myself a daily target worked for the meditation. It wasn't going to work for me, but it may work for you. And so I share all of this because I think when you're wanting to change something, when you feel you have habits which don't support you, don't support the person you. You want to show up as the person that you want to be, then changing them is going to take some time. And I think it's important to really think about why you want to change them, but also think about how you're going to change them. What's the process that you're going to follow? What are the questions you're going to ask yourself? And how will you determine whether, first of all, the change is working for you, but also determine whether you're happy, you know, whether you're happy with the new habit that you're developing? And so I'd like to recap on the three questions I asked myself when deciding to cultivate this daily meditation practice. First question I ask myself, how can it be easy? What can I commit to? 2 questions in one there. So ask yourself that you want to go to the gym more often. Okay. How can that be easy? What can you commit to? Can you commit to going three times a week to. For 15 minutes, 20 minutes? No. Can you commit to doing 10 minutes at home? But it. Stretching, but a weight, whatever it is, how can it be easy? Because if it's easy, you keep doing it. If it's easy, you'll just decide if there's no reason not to, really. But the more friction that's there, the more you put obstacles in the way, particularly in terms of having to do an hour or bust, the less likely you are to do it and the less likely you are to cultivate a new habit. Question number two. When is it going to be easy to do this? What time of day? What can you connect it to? Is it something that is better to do the very first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up? I had a client who likes to who want to develop a writing practice. And what we did was connect it to the time when they sit and have their morning coffee. At that time, they would commit to writing. And again, I think it was, how long can you commit to? And it was 10 minutes a day. Just do 10 minutes. Don't try and do 30 minutes or 45 minutes, commit to 10. And if you do more on a given day, that's fantastic. If you miss a day, it's not the end of the world. But commit to what's easy. And commit to a time of day when it's easy, when your brain is going to trigger you to think, this is the time that I should do the thing. And the third question, how long will you commit to it? And again here think about how this works in relation to not just how you think, but in relation to the habit that you're trying to change. Is it something where having a daily target is going to be helpful? Where you commit for 30 days and then you get to 30 and you say, that was great, I'm going to do another 30 or I'm going to do 60 or I'm going to do 90, or is it something where just committing to showing up for that time each day is going to serve you better? Just saying that today I'm going to do, for example, 10 minutes. And then when you wake up tomorrow, you just say, today I'm going to do 10 minutes. And you just do it that way on a daily basis, whatever works for you. And as I say, it can differ depending upon the habit that you're trying to change, the one that you're trying to transform. So I realize as I'm coming to the end of this episode that I haven't actually told you how long I've meditated for. So I've actually meditated at the time of recording this. I'm on a streak of 102 days daily meditation. And that's daily meditations taking me through kids school holidays, through our holiday to Ibiza, through a couple of late nights and having to sort of wake up really early the next day to get that meditation in. But I feel really great about it. I feel great about it because, just because of the benefits of meditation themselves. But I feel great about it because it's now just becoming who I am. It's no longer a question of I've got to get up, do I really have to go meditate? It's now I am the person that meditates every day. That's just who I am. And this is the great thing about consistency because the longer that you do something, the more it becomes who you are. And when it becomes who you are, then there's no longer a question about whether or not you do the thing. And even if you miss a day or two here or there, it doesn't change who you are. You're still the person who does whatever it is. In my case, I'm still a person who meditates every day. It doesn't matter if I miss a day or if I miss a couple of days, because within myself now, I am just a person. I have built that habit. I have committed to myself that this is now what I do and I love it. And I've now found that this is carrying through to other aspects of my life. So following my holiday in Ibiza and my vision now of some way spending large chunks of my year in Ibiza, at some point I started to start learning Spanish. And I've done the same thing with learning Spanish. Got the Duolingo app committed to 10 minutes a day, and that's what I do. And some days I've gone for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Other days I've just done the 10. But again, I don't want to break that streak now. It's just a habit. It's like today I want to use Spanish. Today I will practice my Spanish. And it's now it's only been 26 days at the time of recording this. But again, the longer that I keep this up, the more it will just become who I am. And I'm not doing it with a view to I'm going to be fluent in Spanish next summer and blah, blah, blah. It's just, I want to be someone who can speak, someone who can get around, someone who can go to Ibiza, I mean, have a conversation in a restaurant, just do basic things. But there is no bigger picture than that. I just want to be someone who speaks Spanish, however good or bad that is. And so each day I sit down and I do the work. Simple as that. Okay, So I hope that this is helpful for you. We're coming up to the end of November as I, as I record this, and people are already starting to think about the new year and resolutions. I don't, I don't deal with resolutions, but whatever works for you. But as we start to think about the things we want to change, things we want to do differently, I hope you'll come back to this episode and also episode 31. Consistency beats intensity. And really look at the habits that you have to support you, the habits that you have that don't support you and that you'd like to change and look at them through the lens of these two episodes and see if you can take some small pearls of wisdom to help you start to get on the path to changing them, to becoming the person who fill in the blank. Whatever it is that it is for you, whatever it is that you. You want to do, send me a message. Send me an email. Hey, @iamrinespence.com or send me a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn and let me know what habit is that you're trying to cultivate or what habit it is that you're trying to change. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to be able to cheer you on and support you. And yeah, I really just like to hear what you take away from these shows because everything that I share here has been really powerful for me and I'm hoping that they are just as powerful for you in some way shape or form and share share the episode with anyone you know who is desperately trying to change something he's been maybe been trying for a long time to give something up or try something new or cultivate something that supports their well being and their mission. Where it is that they want to go share the episode with them. You know, we, we've got to help the people around us. It's, it's how we create this ripple effect. It's how we all progressively get better, better within ourselves. We, we get to know ourselves better. We get to just live our lives better. I mean whatever better means for you as an individual. And if you're looking for support or you're just not quite sure how having support can help you on your path to living a life that's lit help you on your path to cultivating, developing and sustaining which is the main thing these habits that just become who you are. Why not book a call? Let's have a chat. This is what I do as a coach. This is what I help my clients with. I help them develop tools and strategies and develop habits that support the person they want to become so that support the life that they want to live. That support them in living life lit. Head to iamrinespence.com coaching and check out the page. Read about what coaching is and from there you can book a call a free one hour consultation where I'll get to know bit more about what it is that you're. You're going through, what you're looking to work on and look at ways that I can support you with that and see if we're a good fit to work together again. I am Ryan Spence.com coaching looking forward to getting on a call with you and helping support you as we come to the end of this year and roll into 2023 and until then thanks for being here. Catch you again next week. Stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life lit. Thanks for tuning in but before you go the weight of limiting beliefs is heavy. It literally weighs you down and keeps you stuck in that life of lethargy. I know. It's why I stayed in Big Law for so long. And it's why so many of my clients don't believe they can do the things that they want to do. But what causes those limiting beliefs? It's a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence in the belief that you can do the things that you want to do. And I've got something for that. It's my confidence journal. It's six journal prompts that I created that I've used to help me get from where I am to where I want to be. To help to give me the belief to do the things that seem outside of my control, outside of. Of what I can do. If this sounds like you, you need to get your hands on the journal. Best thing about it, it's free. All you have to do is head to iamrynespence.com hit the button for confidence journal and get your copy today. It's going to help you start to reframe your thoughts and get you thinking about what you can do instead of focusing on what you can't do. Shed that load of limiting beliefs that you don't need to be carrying. See you again next week. And until that time, stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit.