Earlier in our micro habits online course, we learned how habits are superior to goals because they are smaller, sustainable, and deliver immediate results. We discussed ways to track progress in reaching building habits. We recognize goals are amazing and a necessary part of life, but building strong habits to support and achieve goals is the only way to see them happen. Not only that, habits can be an excellent way to prove you are, in fact, headed towards your goals and the big win you are gunning for. They are a way of tacking your progress in reaching your goals.
Keeping Track of your Habits is Proof of Your Success
If you’ve ever motivated a toddler with a star chart, you know the benefits of tracking your progress. Each time your child places a star on their chart, everyone does a happy dance for the micro-step in the right direction. A full chart equals goals achieved and the triumphant realization of the goals.
Along the way, your toddler internalizes the benefits of the chores or actions and they become a routine part of their lives over time, they may not need the sticker or the happy dance to have the desired behavior.
People LOVE Seeing Their Success and therefore look for ways to track their progress
Psychologically, people love seeing their success. There’s something about checking things off that triggers feel-good hormones in the brain. Creating a chart, keeping a journal, or finding some way to chronicle your micro habits can help boost the likelihood they will continue and become automatic.
Get Creative Tracking Your Progress
Depending on the micro habit you are developing, there are plenty of ways to track them. Some apps for diet and exercise have tracking built-in with milestones to celebrate along the way. You can easily go old school and track your progress in a notebook or on your smartphone.
Celebrate Wins Early and Often
Don’t wait too long to give yourself the credit you deserve for making changes. Celebrate as often as you need to keep yourself motivated and encouraged to keep going. Include trusted friends or family in your goals to master a micro habit and involve them in your celebrations too, their enthusiasm will boost your esteem.
It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come when you’re not tracking your progress. Keeping a record and finding ways to track the progress of your micro habits and reviewing them regularly can emphasize how much effort you’ve given to changing your lifestyle and living the life you deserve.
If you are looking for a habit course and an app that allows for tracking please check out our habits course here:
This video is by Dr. Erica and she will describe maintaining good mental health and its effectiveness.
The time now for another wellness mentor with Dr. Erica Field from holistic family practice.
Self-concept relates to how you perceive yourself in the world. So your thoughts and your feelings all create your reality. And so making sure that you have a healthy self-concept is really important for your habits, your actions, and ultimately your behaviors as well as your lifestyles. affirming to yourself every single day that you’re healthy, you’re vibrant and your whole all concrete, healthy actions of health throughout the day.
Taking those affirmations right before bed, meaning saying them to yourself as well as right when you wake up, ensures that throughout the day you’re having a healthy mental diet. A healthy mental diet looks like being able to express and communicate to yourself throughout the day what it is you want with your health.
So I’m healthy. I’m happy, I’m whole and vibrant. Doing so can allow for your actions and your behaviors such as eating healthy or drinking water to carry through throughout the day. Having a healthy self-concept can allow you to be able to have a healthy and vibrant lifestyle for years to come.
If you feel trapped under a bad habit, it may feel like you’ll never get out from underneath. Depending on the hold the habit has, you may have tried and failed more than once. It’s normal to have bad habits…everyone does. So it is important to work towards changing bad habits to good habits by breaking bad habits. Nearly any habit can be broken if you begin to create new, healthier habits to counteract them.
You Don’t Have to Stop a Bad Habit All at Once
Some habits are tough to break. It may be impossible to drop them all at once. Instead, focus on changing one thing or adding a positive micro habit that helps. Here’s an example- Eating sweets after 8:00 pm.
It may seem impossible to give up a nighttime sweet snack when you have a sweet tooth that demands attention. So, start chipping away at the habit by replacing aspects of the habit with something better.
Effective micro habit #1- Eat a sensible dessert with dinner. The simple small habit of adding something sweet at dinnertime can help start to shift your attention from a late-night snack to fulfilling your sweet tooth craving earlier.
Effective micro habit #2- Drink a low-calorie drink each night at 7:00 pm. Offsetting your sweet tooth by enjoying a low-calorie drink can sustain your cravings and make it easier to avoid a bigger urge to splurge later at night.
Effective micro habit #3- Start a new habit at 8:00 pm that distracts you entirely. If you busy yourself at 8:00 pm with activity, your brain can rewire itself to forget about something sweet, especially if the activity is fun.
Ask Yourself Some Questions
If you find yourself trapped in breaking bad habits, why not counsel yourself? Outside of addictions, most habits can be broken without a lot of trouble. One way to change bad habits to good habits is to ask yourself questions until you unravel the bad habit and replace it with a good one.
Here’s an example –
Interrupting people when they talk- This habit can create problems at work, socially, or in close relationships. Breaking the bad habit can make it easier to get along with others and make you more likable.
Ask yourself these questions to help break down the bad habit and introduce a healthy micro habit:
Why do I interrupt people when they speak?
How does it feel when people interrupt me?
What is my goal when I engage with other people?
What can I do to avoid interrupting others?
What habit can I put into place to stop myself when I am about to interrupt?
This self-counseling can help replace a bad habit with a good habit and start to shift behavior quickly.
You can bust nearly any bad habit by paying closer attention to breaking bad habits and starting to slowly change it. Changing bad habits to good habits looks like Introducing good micro habits and over time the negative habits will be replaced by micro habits that add up to better, healthier behaviors.
If you are looking to shift your habits to healthy ones check out our online course on creating habits here
This is the video of Dr. Steele on healthy lifestyle tips. A healthy lifestyle can lead you to a better life.
Hey welcome back time now for another wellness minute with Dr. Erica steel from holistic family practice in Virginia Beach.
Building a healthy habit takes time. So it’s important that you move slowly and effortlessly to create a lifestyle. It’s important to add rather than takeaway.
Building Healthy Habits include adding fruits and vegetables to your diet so that unhealthy things such as processed foods, sugary drinks, and things like that diminish the body, it’s easier to begin slowly and effortlessly so that you build a lifestyle rather than trying to force yourself to do it. Take for instance eating healthy food.
It’s easier to add healthy foods slowly over time, such as your fruits and vegetables so that your body doesn’t crave processed foods rather than going after cutting the sugar from day one.
Adding those fruits and vegetables is going to help the body heal slowly and effortlessly so you can incorporate more of a lifestyle of healthy eating building healthy habits does take time.
So it’s important that you be patient with yourself and allow for the process to happen. In the event that you do. Stop or break or have an accident with it. Then you can just get right back on the horse and build resilience
“You need to push yourself, you need to test yourself, you need to get out of your comfort zone.” How many times have you heard that? What does that really mean to most people because how to get out of your comfort zone sometimes remains a mystery?
It means to put yourself at risk, to make yourself feel uncomfortable, to put yourself in a place where you feel less than confident, less than competent. And for WHAT exactly?
Have you ever met anyone who continually puts themself at risk, continually makes themselves uncomfortable, that has done anything extraordinary? These are people who are leaders in actively what it means to be stepping out of your comfort zone.
We all know what happens if you HAVE to do something that makes you feel bad or uncomfortable all the time. You quit! It’s human nature, isn’t it?
Expand Your Comfort Zone by Working WITHIN It
Rather than trying to figure out how to get out of your comfort zone, doing the opposite produces outstanding results in any field of endeavor you care to mention.
Take anyone who is at the top of their game, if we observe them, understand how to get out of our comfort zone they leave clues for us to learn
Let’s look at Usain Bolt, for example. At the time of this writing, he’s known as the fastest human being on the planet. Did he ever get out of his comfort zone? No!
If, when he was a young college student, he had entered the Olympics, he would have suffered inevitable defeat, time and time again. I know that you know that, and he knew it too. It’s common sense.
So, what did he do? And how can we learn from him when you are stepping out of your comfort zone.
He realized that he could run pretty fast at an early age. Someone introduced him to a Running Coach, who did what? The coach suggested that he practice. Usain practiced, first weekly, then daily, and he got faster.
As his speed increased, so did his confidence:
His Coach entered him into a race. He won and his confidence increased even more. He practiced more often, with more intensity. The results kept coming, and his confidence and competence increased proportionately. In order to achieve this, you must be actively stepping out of your comfort zone.
He continued to practice, but with more focus and discipline. He won State and National races and eventually, he emerged on the International circuit. He continued to practice and maintain his training discipline. He got faster, and as he did, his confidence and competence continued to grow.
Then, when the Olympics rolled around this time, he shocked the whole world, and especially his competitors, with his blistering speed. The rest, as they say, is history. Not once did he “get out of his comfort zone.” Not once did he put himself at risk or make himself feel uncomfortable. What would be the point?
Everything he did was WITHIN his comfort zone, which expanded in direct proportion to the increase and growth in his level of confidence and competence. That was brought about by practice in the right environment with the right kind of support.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Pick another one. Beyoncé is a world-class singer. Did she ever get out of her comfort zone? No! When she was very young and realized that she had a voice, what did she do? Did she book Madison Square Garden for a Concert?
No, she didn’t, and why not? Because not only did she not have the experience for it, but it also would have made her feel uncomfortable, it would have put her at risk and crushed her confidence, and what would be the point in that?
What did she do then? She practiced:
She practiced at home, she practiced at school, and she practiced in the car too. When someone introduced her to a Voice Coach, her potential was immediately acknowledged and her practice took on a whole new level.
She became more focused and more disciplined in her voice training, and her confidence and competence grew. She sang at small local venues. People loved her voice, she got standing ovations and her confidence and competence grew at every event.
Eventually, she started touring to sell-out events and started recording. She still practices. She applies focus and discipline to her training. Her confidence and competence are huge, and now she is a global star.
At no time did she ever ‘get out of her comfort zone’, put herself at risk, or make herself feel bad. What would be the point? You can practice how to get out of your comfort zone by stepping out of your comfort zone.
This Process Works!
You can pick anyone you want who is an acknowledged expert in their field, at the top of their game, or has the expertise that people look up to. None of them needed to put themselves at risk, feel vulnerable, or make themself feel bad to get to where they are today. They just didn’t.
What they ALL did was to bring what they needed to improve INSIDE their comfort zone and expanded it from within. And they ALL had a Coach.
Think for yourself. Let your intuition be your guide. Just because someone says something, it doesn’t make it true and certainly doesn’t make it true for you. Practice, be focused, and be disciplined. And get yourself a Coach. It will be the very best decision you can make if you want to get REALLY good at what you do.
