How To Create A Habit | Training Tip Tuesday

It's the beginning of the year, and likely we have so many things we want to change and do. Read or listen to the post below (audio from video), or head to my YouTube channel to see the video. 

 Transcript from Audio

Hey, this is Mercedes Pollmeier with Training Tip Tuesday.

I'm going to be releasing a video every Tuesday make sure that you subscribe to my mailing list, so you won’t miss any new information. 

My goal every week with this Training Tip Tuesday is to give you something very actionable to move forward with every week.

So this week we're going to be talking about how to form a habit and you know,

it's the beginning of the year. Maybe you're super stoked on changing things

and maybe you've got a list of things that you're going to achieve this year, and maybe you've already moved forward on trying a lot of different things and doing a lot of new things or maybe you don't have the motivation right now, but you do want to change something this year/ 

Wherever you're at, I'm going to help you with these very quick and simple steps.

So the first thing you want to think about is... In order to be successful you have to be consistent

and so just like Aristotle said 

“We are what we repeatedly we do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”

So first I want you to think about your goal and then distill it down into something so easy that you can't say “No.” 

You have to choose something that mentally doesn't drain you when you think about it and you can easily do. If you need some help developing your goals, you can purchase my book Simple Strength or Peak Nutrition. I do go over how to develop those goals.

Really what you want to do is only choose. One goal and do one thing at a time, trust me.

This is very important in order to be successful. You have to start easy and simple and small.

For example, if you want to improve your climbing, you have those big climbing goals, you have to distill these into very small components.

And normally we distill this down into skills and practices and then into a very easy actions.

An easy action to increase my climbing ability is to work on my finger strength. So, I'm going to allocate 5 minutes every day to hanging on the hang board.

Since it's just five minutes, there's nothing to really worry about in terms of volume. It's about creating a habit. 

So now you have your very small easy task.

Just like the hang boarding example for five minutes every day.

But in order to do the thing we want to do, we have to stack it onto an already established habit.

We are what we do, not what we plan to do.

Even just writing it down. That's not enough. You have to put this into action. So what you can do is think about the habits that you have in place already and then choose one and stack this new habit on top of it.

For example, I want to do a 5-minute hang session and I'm going to stack that on a habit that I already have which is eating dinner.

I do that every day. So before eating dinner, I'm going to hang for five minutes. Another thing you could do maybe in the morning is after I have my morning drink, I love coffee, after I drink my coffee, I'm going to hang for five minutes.

You're going you have to connect one to the other so that you're easily reminded to do this new habit. When it's something new we often tend to forget about it.

So now I want you to do the action. 

Take five minutes, I want you to sit down and think about:

1. What goal you have
2. Distill that down into the skills that you need 
3. Distill this down into the practices that you need to develop those skills.
4. Then the small actions in order to make that practice happen.
5. Come up with a habit that you're already doing and stack it together.

Alright, so that is the first training tip Tuesday.

I know that this system works. This has helped many of my clients, and I know that this is going to help you too, I want you to be successful this year.

Figure out these small steps and take action right now.