Hi guys, Kris from Custom Fitness here, your Amarillo personal trainer. Today’s topic is habit based success. So, one of the characteristics that I see most often or most commonly among our most successful clients is their ability to stay consistent and a lot of people feel like, “Man that’s just hard. I fall off the wagon and I don’t get results.” So, more than 40% of our daily behaviors are done unconsciously or habitually. That’s why Custom Fitness makes such an effort to work on habits rather than just saying we’re going to lose so much body fat. We work on building the habits that lead to lifestyle change. So, you alone have the power of choice. You alone have the power of something called individual responsibility.
You Make The Choice
That means that you can make the choice to eat well and exercise consistently. You can make the choice to get enough sleep or recovery workouts or not. You can do those things and you have that individual responsibility to do that. If you’ve chosen XYZ as your goal, then you have to make the choices that are going to move you forward towards that goal. Every time that we make a choice, any choice at all, it could be getting up in the morning, it could be whether or not to work out, it could be something more significant. You’re either moving forward, you’re taking steps forward towards your goal or you’re taking steps away from your goal. So you have to understand that you have that responsibility of choice. It’s not magic, nor motivation and it’s not a kick in the pants that’s going to get you there. It is learning to take control of yourself and the situation that you are in and to quit reacting to the things around you.
That may sound silly, but a lot of times, let’s say for instance a client may be on track, maybe they are working towards losing body fat and all of the sudden they end up out to eat at a Mexican food restaurant with a bunch of friends. Instead of making the best choices they could towards their goals, they react to the situation of being emotionally involved with all these people and worrying about what they’re going to think about them and they choose foods that may not be the best for them or drinks that may not be the best for them. So, it’s time to be proactive! It’s time to think ahead. In that same situation, I would warn that client, knowing what had happened before, that maybe we need to make a plan before you go out to dinner. Maybe let’s figure out what you’re going to order before you even get there.
Look online at the menu. Figure out what you’re going to order and then make sure you order maybe a to-go box with it so you’re set. So you’re not in a panic to figure out what to do and you don’t feel uncomfortable in that situation. You just look like you know what you’re doing. That being said, being proactive is huge in reaching your goals and finding success. This is really where habit based success comes from, which is planning head and focusing on some things. So, we’ve got three bullet points here of things to really kind of put you in perspective.
Break Your Goals Down
So, we want to laser focus on your goals. Whatever that goal may be. Maybe it’s an outcome goal like losing body fat. Maybe it’s a behavior goal like exercising three times a week. Those are both great goals. They’re very clear, very defined and you’re able to progress towards them. However, if your goal is more general in scope like I want to be generally healthy and fit or I want to feel better, those are excellent goals in a general sense, but we need to make them more specific. There’s no way to track them on a more specific level to see your progress and generalizations will typically lead you to more frustration because you don’t have a way to measure that progress and that’s where people start to lose that motivation and determination.
Therefore, we want to make sure we strip that down into its basic parts. Number one, figure out what it is that we can break out of that goal to make it more specific. Number two, figure out what has to be done daily in order for you to reach that goal. So for me, as a business owner, as a mom, as a human being, I use a lot of daily tasks to help me out through the day to make sure that I get everything done. I know that if I have it planned out, I get all of these tasks done, then I’m going to be more successful in my general day. I know that each day that I do these tasks it gets a little easier. So for me, I may track it on Trello or my Google calendar, whatever it may be.
Create Better Habits
Every day, I have to get up and fix my kids breakfast and I have to pack their lunches. I have to get them out the door and then when I get to work, I’ve got to check my emails, check my messages and make videos for you guys. Whatever it may be. Each day that I do those, the habits get a little bit easier. So, it takes less thought, less struggle and less time to get it all done, but it’s something that I know that if I were to just wake up one morning and not fix my kids breakfast, we’re not going to have a very successful day. However, whenever it comes to health and fitness goals, a lot of times we do just that. We wake up and we think, “I’m really comfortable in bed. I don’t really want to go to that 6:00 AM workout that I signed up for.”
Then we end up falling off track. We get upset because we don’t see our results and it’s all because we made that one choice. That one choice repeated itself. So, if we chose not to go to workout one day, it’s not going to derail us completely. But if we choose that and we continue to choose that over and over and over again, that’s where we don’t see progress. We get very frustrated. So, too many people come in telling me that they quit something because they didn’t see progress. Maybe it was 9 or 10 somethings. Well, there’s several reasons that they might not see progress. It might not have been the right program for them. That’s a very good possibility in this day and age. This is a multi-million dollar industry.
Figure Out If You’re A Good Fit
When you look at infomercials on TV, that’s not built for a specific population that includes you all the time. Sometimes you can do those programs and get results. Sometimes they’re not the right fit. That can be the same case at a gym, at your friend doing a diet on Facebook, whatever it may be. The program has to fit your body. That’s why we always do a consultation first just to get to know people and see if what we offer is the right fit because I don’t want to take somebody through a program that wasn’t the right fit for our program just to say sorry you didn’t get where you wanted to be. So most of the people who join with us, they’ve all sat down with me or with one of my team members, we go through the whole process and we figure out yes they are a good fit and then most people, I would say probably 99% see results very quickly through the program when they’re following it.
They do a great job of seeing that but it’s because we make sure that we’re a good fit for them. It’s not just pull somebody in off the streets and hope this works. So, if you’re that person who has quit things over and over and over again because you didn’t see progress, you felt frustrated, you were angry, maybe you felt like a failure, know that it’s not always you. Sometimes it’s that program that you chose. So, that’s number one. Number two would be that maybe we just made the wrong choices. Maybe we didn’t hold ourselves accountable the way that we needed to. Maybe we didn’t move forward the way that we needed to. It’s just a big thing. So, with those bullet points, one that we need to add in there is personal accountability or taking responsibility for your own actions.
Too often we leave that up to other people. Now, I joke with people all the time that as a training team, 90% of our job is accountability and helping people to stay on track with the goals that they’ve chosen for themselves, but in truth, while we do help with that, the person has to be willing to hold themselves accountable first and foremost because there’s nothing that I can do to help someone if they’re not holding themselves accountable. There’s just not. So, it’s no different than raising kids. I can’t force them to do certain things if they’re not willing to take the responsibility to do some of that.
Accountability
So, we have to make sure that we’re taking that personal accountability seriously and understand that you are the only one who’s going to get you out of bed for that 6:00 AM workout. You are the only one who’s going to make those better choices when you’re out to eat with friends and moving yourself forward towards those goals. Now, there is great support and accountability help around you, that’s where our team comes in; we help to support and give accountability help to our clients but we can’t create it for them. So, we want people to know that they need that extra help because sometimes it’s really lonely out there. I can tell you that, as an entrepreneur, the world of being an entrepreneur can be very lonely and as someone’s seeking success in health and fitness sometimes the world can feel lonely there too.
So, having someone there to support you, to help lift you up, to help move you forward is a great thing but it all starts with your personal responsibility and accountability. So, if you put those three bullet points together: the laser focus on your goals, the daily habits that have to be done and the personal accountability, when you put those things together, you actually start to develop some really great habits that are going to lead you to progress and success. You’re going to see that over time that consistency is key. So, without consistency we lose sight of what it was that we were doing in the first place. So, if we’re doing it every couple of weeks or once a month or we get on for four days and we fall off, that’s not very consistent. Our body doesn’t know what to do with that. Our mind doesn’t know what to do with that. We start to feel frustrated because our body won’t respond right. It takes time.
So, we have to find a plan and program that’s right for us. That’s where we create things that are what I like to call “Done With You” programs. So, we create that sense of accountability and structure and support and we provide you with everything to do and then we walk alongside you as you do it. The “Done For You” group, maybe you’re in there. That’s great. A lot of “Done For Yous” can go out, they can find a program online that works or kind of tie the pieces together and find the right thing and they do it on their own and they’re great. The other people, maybe they go out and they do it completely on their own. They just make it all up as they go. Maybe they do great.
There are some people out there and I know them. We have clients like them that need help and guidance pushing forward; making sure that the time and money that they’re using are not being wasted and that they are constantly taking steps forward towards their goals rather than backwards. So, if that’s you, if you would like some help moving forward towards your goals, maybe you know what to do. I just had a client in yesterday who said, “I know everything to do but I’m not doing it.” So we had to sit down and make a new game plan. How can we get this done? We had to rearrange the thought process a little bit and work on some of these more basic habits to get her back in the swing of things. So, if that’s how you’re feeling right now, you need a little bit of help moving forward or maybe you need a lot of help moving forward, need to know what to do, then feel free to give us a call. 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz. At Custom Fitness, we are YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo, Texas.
Have a great day!