Hi there. I’m Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness Personal Training Studio and hopefully I’m going to give you a little bit of enlightenment today that your habits are the cornerstone. The cornerstone is the initial piece of any foundation that is built. It is the most important piece because without it we can’t build the rest of whatever is being built. So if we don’t have our habits in place already, we can feel a little chaotic. I can tell you from experience that my clients, through our habit based coaching, have experienced more success during things like holiday seasons where typically people would get off track and kind of reset themselves to the starting line, our clients are able to maintain.
Now, why is that? Because habits are the cornerstone. So that’s why we make such a big deal about coaching on habits. If you’ve gone to the effort to say lose weight or learn to eat better or manage your time differently and you don’t have the habits in place to do that, but you’ve just kind of set up a system, whether it be on paper or it was a three week deal and you’re like, the next three weeks I’m going to get this done. It’s a short term duration deal, then you’re going to get it done during that short period sometimes, but other times, especially in times of extra stress, you’re going to fall off pretty quick and feel like, man, that just didn’t work for me. I lost the weight and then I gained it back or I got my time figured out and then it just can stick to it. Maybe it was something else that happened.
Well, the problem isn’t typically that something else came up. The problem is that we did not keep our strong guard rails on- our habits. We have to keep practicing our habits. So if all we did to lose weight was not eat for a few days, well we really can’t hold that up, right? But if what we did to lose weight was we built a habit around eating healthy meals three times a day and doing that seven days a week and then making sure that we’re drinking enough water and we’re doing these things, then we can maintain our weight loss because those habits become our focus.
I had a client a while back, they came to me after reaching goal after goal after goal to say, “You know what? Whenever I started this process, my ultimate goal was X and I’ve already almost reached that and now I just feel kind of stuck. I don’t really know where to go from there because that was my goal.”
So we discussed the fact that a goal, while it’s great, is an outcome goal. Our behaviors, our habits are what lead us and guide us to this lifestyle of better health. So if our goal is only a number on a scale, well that’ll be exciting for a little while, but if we can figure out how to move past that, then maybe we can maintain or improve that number on the scale just by moving forward because a lot of times our initial goal is set by what our mind believes we can truly do.
If you’ve been trying to lose weight for years and years and you just haven’t done it, or you’ve tried it and it comes back full circle, then having a number on a scale as your goal is not really the ultimate goal because in your mind you may say, “Well, I know that I can lose 50 pounds, so I’m just going to say 50 pounds is my goal,” but maybe you really need to lose more than that. That’s fine. Let’s not sell ourselves short on these goals. And we do that by focusing on making sure that we have that outcome in mind because that’s helpful in motivation and determination and getting there, but we want to make sure that we’re building the habits, that we understand that the habits are our true goals.
So if we want the outcome of losing our example 50 pounds, then we have to build the habits of building towards that goal, right? The habits of eating well and exercising consistently and making sure we’re getting sleep and managing our time well and doing these things to take care of ourselves and if we focus on those as our goals, not only are we going to reach that 50 pound outcome, but we’re also going to start to feel like, man, when I do these things, I feel better and when you feel better, it makes you want to continue, which gives you the motivation to keep moving forward.
So even after that outcome goal is out of sight because you’ve already surpassed it, you still have these habits to fall on to say, “Well, I may not still want to lose another 50 pounds, but I sure do feel better when I eat well and when I exercise and when I sleep well and I manage my time well and as you do those things, it just becomes this cyclical event to where you keep working on them in the future. And eventually what happens is the goal that you created with your own mind of how much weight you thought you needed to lose becomes kind of this figurative thing because your body then takes over as you’re following these healthy habits.
Your body takes over and finds its best place to function. So where we feel like we have to be in control all the time, spoken from a type A control freak, we don’t necessarily have to be in control, but we think that we do. We think that we have to be in control and so we set these goals and we say, this is my number, this is how much I have to weigh.
The problem is that our body is actually in control. The universe is in control. God’s in control over us. We are not in control. You get that? There’s so many other things that are in control of us, not us. So you keep practicing these habits over and over and over again. As you practice them, your body actually takes over and says, “Oh my goodness, this is where I feel best.”
Then from that point, even though the same habits created that weight loss earlier on, the same habits are not going to help you to maintain your best level of health. That’s really what we’re all aiming for, right? Whether we know it or not, whether it’s a conscious thought or it’s intentional, it’s the fact that we’re aiming for our best level of health that can continue to carry us through this life, to be able to take care of all that we love, whether that’s people or it’s tasks or it’s our job or whatever that may be. We’re taking care of things in our best level of health and we do that through continuing these habits.
Now guaranteed you may not be able to reach for the stars the way that you could whenever you were in a less upside down world a few weeks ago. Right now, our world has turned over and we are a little stressed, right…to put it lightly. We’re a little bit stressed. We’re experiencing things that we haven’t experienced before and we’re not always sure which way to turn. I can tell you that’s my day every day. I feel like my world just exploded and I’m picking up little pieces here and there and hoping that they fit together or that I can find a new piece to fit in the middle like a three year old would do a puzzle, just kind of cram it down or say my seven year old, that just tries to cram it in and make sure that it works.
We’re just trying to pick up these pieces and if we’re so focused on the pieces and what was before and the results that we used to have, and I’m talking beyond weight loss here. We’re talking about our eating habits. We’re talking about being able to manage our time well whenever we’ve got family and things going on, managing our stress levels, making sure we’re taking care of ourselves, making sure that we’ve got control of our mornings. I know a lot of people I’ve been talking to lately used to have their morning routine and now the whole family’s involved in that morning routine and it’s kind of stressing them out.
So we’re trying to find the ways to build these habits to support our results, whatever they are, whether it’s in fitness and health or whether it’s just self care and our daily routine and the more that you can focus on those habits rather than what was, the more that you’re going to be able to successfully come out of this situation with your health and with your sanity, to be able to move forward because you now have those pieces that you needed and those pieces are your habits that you needed to pick up.
So I, for one, as I said, am feeling the same stress that you are. I’m going through this every day trying to figure out new ways to handle new situations, but I have recently realized how far off my habits were and I’m starting to try to apply those again, habits as little as wake up at the same time every morning. Make sure that the kids are ready to start their day at the same time every morning and not in their pajamas. There’s a lot of little habits out there that we need to be working on and if you think about it, it can feel very overwhelming. So instead of thinking about it all, what I want you to do is think about the area that you feel like right now is probably your hardest area. What is your hardest thing to be able to maintain day to day that used to be really easy or it used to be something that you just reached right before all of this? What is that area?
I would love for you to communicate that with me and I’d love to be able to help you set up a plan on how to maintain that through your habits over the next weeks to months that this chaos may last. We would love to be able to help you a little bit more with that and it’s not anything that I’m asking you to commit to anything. I just want to be able to help as many people as I can right now through this situation. So feel free to message me below and let me know what your biggest issues are right now, where you’re struggling the most or you can send me a private message if you want to and we’d love to be able to help you out with that.
But if you are interested in working with us, I do want to let you know about a special deal that we’re doing now. The next 30 days for $30 and it doesn’t start today, it’s just over the next 30 days. We’re doing 30 days for $30 and you’re going to get full access to our live coaching, to our on demand coaching, to our nutrition coaching, to mindset coaching, just about everything that we have. We are going to give you full access to that because I want you to be able to experience this and I know that online training, online coaching can feel kind of scary.
We’ve done online workouts and that’s fine. Nobody really sees us and we’re doing it when we feel like it. The coaching aspect feels a little different, especially here in Amarillo. Amarillo’s a very face to face community and so I’d just like to give you the opportunity to try it. It’s something that we’ve done with clients for the last eight years. It has not been a prime area of our business because I really love face to face stuff, but right now we are pivoting with the world and everything is going online obviously because we want to be able to keep that connection. We want to be able to keep people sane through that connection. We need to be able to talk to each other and to experience coaching and if you’re struggling in your life, I would love to be able to help out.
So again, feel free to message me below, or I’ll put the link in for the 30 30 and feel free to, click on that or to comment and ask me questions about it and I’ll be happy to send you over some information, but I hope that you’ll be able to take some time today to kind of think about what area you need to be focused on and I would love for you to communicate that with me, but if you don’t keep working on it yourself and reach out when you need some help. Hope you have a great day.