Ep. 48 đ„HOT Habit Checklist Mindmap Version
If I can get my client and friend to create a habit my job as their Personal Trainer AND Life Coach is 99% complete!
I have been the Fitness and Wellness Director at OCuSOFT since 2013. We have grown from about 75 employees in 2013 to 176 in the Houston office and 24 outside sales reps across the country today. (2022)
I recently moved back full-time to the gym for the first time since 2020 due to the pandemic restrictions and needs of the company.
I offer my services of everything I coach online for free to the team members. Out of those 200 employees, I have 26 on my email list for the gym. And only 3 of those 26 actually take my courses and ask me questions about fitness. đŻđ„
Maybe they donât like me, itâs okay, Iâm not for everyone! But I seriously doubt that is the reason. And I have been thinking about this very thing for years now.
I think, âI am FREE. If you get me talking about fitness and life coaching I will not shut up. I have years and years of experience and education under my belt. So whatâs the issue?â
Ever since I was a kid I have been obsessed with behavior modification, why people act and think as they do, and fitness. When I want to learn something I immerse myself in the books and education around this. I am a voracious reader! Click here for just a few of the books I have read and recommend. đŻ
Over the past 6 months, I have immersed myself in the study of habits and behavior modification. I read and re-read and listened to books like Innercise, The Slight Edge, The Power of Habit, and Atomic Habits.
A light bulb went off in my headđĄ!!
If I can get my clients and friends to create a habit. Then and only then can I actually help them with their fitness goals.
I have been certified for over 20 years now. I have worked with thousands of people from age 15 to age 90+.
If you are suffering from pain - fitness and mindset is the answer.
If you need to drop a few pounds - fitness and mindset is the answer.
If you are lacking in productivity at work - fitness and mindset is the answer.
Have you been diagnosed with an illness? - Fitness, and mindset is the answer.
Suffering from depression, anxiety, or another mental condition - fitness and mindset is the answer.
Are you stressed out? Fitness and mindset is the answer.
Okay, you get it!
Pro tip: Your mental and physical health requires assistance from professionals. Nothing can substitute the help of mental health professionals. Read this blog post.
Now you may be saying, âKathie thatâs easy for you to say you are in fitness and mindset.â Yes, thatâs true. But it wasnât very long ago I was in the same boat as the people above. Let me explain.
In January of this year (2022 if you are reading this later) I fell off the wagon. I was completely fatigued and exhausted. I was aching all over and I had a bad habit that I was completely unaware of - (just FYI itâs not my fault itâs how our brains work). Stick with me here.
I got my blood work done in March and found out that my body was not processing nutrients properly, most specifically my insulin production was down and causing me to be almost âdiabetic.â At this time I blamed it on women's hormone imbalance. I am as old as the Super Bowl (1966) so I guess I am due!
Even after seeing those results, I continued to drink, not 1, but 2 Monster drinks a day.đŻđŻ It was a BAD HABIT. Mind you I felt like crap, my workouts were down to nothing, and when I did the workout I was sore for days.
Then it hit me. When I read this post on my Instagram. I was like caffeine and the chemicals in the Monster drink were my âbadâ habit. How could I??
Remember how I said it wasnât my fault? Well, it wasnât. It was my brainâs fault. It was an unconscious âhabit.â
Habit is the key word here. Did you know that when you have a habit, bad or good, your brain does not know the difference? We just do it unconsciously.
Much like my Monster drink habit. I knew in my mind it was not good. I also had everyone tell me that they were bad for me. I didnât listen - it was unconscious.
When we become AWARE that our bad habits are hurting us we begin to find another way. Awareness is #1 on the đ„HOT HABIT Checklist, but I get ahead of myself.
I immediately got rid of the big package of monster drinks I had just purchased. But I had another problem - how was I going to handle the caffeine withdrawal of headaches and pain?
You know, I have all this knowledge about fitness, mindset, and behavior modification in my brain! Remember, any age 15-90+. Yes! Including helping myself when I catch myself in the âbadâ habit loop.
This is why I created the brand new đ„HOT HABIT Checklist. Todayâs video and podcast episode is all about this checklist and how it can help you.
Below are 3 ways to absorb this content:
Transcript below
You can also download this post to read later.
Download your đ„HOT Habit Checklist now! And never miss the great content I will be spewing!! Sure hope to see you there!
Show Notes:
Todayâs Episode is All about the đ„HOT Habit Checklist
We discuss:
Habits are powerful but delicate
Bad habits are not your fault - blame the caveman!
Become aware
Change your identity
Recipe for sustained success
Change your processes
Change your outcomes
Create friction
Set clear goals
Find harmony
Expect failure
Embody the new habit
Links mentioned in this episode:
Video: https://youtu.be/O2Ky1d2Voqc
Blog Post: https://www.kathieowen.com/blog/hot-habit-checklist
Books: Innercise, The Slight Edge, Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit
The story about Michael Phelps: https://tinyurl.com/2p8s5ddr
Transcript (expect errors)âŠ.
I often say, as a personal trainer, if I can get my client and friend to create a habit, my job is 99% done. What does that mean? That means if I can get my client to create a habit, I can instill all them the knowledge that I have up here in my head. And get them to follow healthy habits as well, but habits are a delicate thing.
And if you're stuck in a bad habit loop, it's not your fault. I promise it's not your fault. You're just not even aware. And that's what we're gonna talk about today.
You're listening to or watching the Stop the Mind Screw Podcast Iâm your host. Kathie Owen Certified Fitness Trainer and Life Coach since 2002, teaching others the Stop the Mind Screw Process on this show, we talk about fitness, health, wellness, habits, mindset, it's mindset, and even some Reality Transurfing I title today's mind map the Hot Habit Checklist.
For that's the title of my new download on habits. So where do we start? When it comes to our habit checklist, we start with awareness. As I said, at the very beginning of this episode, your brain cannot tell the difference between good and bad habits. And we're established in what is called a habit loop of your cue, your routine and reward.
All of those three things stay the same unless you create a new habit. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Habits are unconscious, regardless of the lesson in the book, the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. They studied this man named Eugene and he had meningitis and it damaged part of his brain where habits are made.
Eugene had a bad habit of eating breakfast four times a morning, regardless of hunger and not knowing that he already ate so many of us mindlessly do our habits just like this. So what happened with Eugene was his cues were the morning light. Or the way the TV show that was on in the morning or the way things looked around the house or felt, or maybe he just had his typical morning routine of getting out of bed, going to the bathroom and brushing his teeth, and then he'd go to the kitchen and he wouldn't just make a healthy breakfast.
He made bacon and eggs every morning, sometimes four times a morning. As you can imagine this became a problem and they had to shift his habits to something else. And that's what the hot habit checklist is all about. It's about the habit loop and becoming aware of your habit loop. So your cue is what you see your routine is what you do and your reward is what you get.
Take for example, my bad habit of drinking monster drinks. I know, I know they're so bad for you. And people would tell me this all the time when they'd see me drinking them. And I didn't just drink one a day. I drank two a day. And I knew that this was causing me problems, but it wasn't until after I had my blood work done and I felt like crap.
And I was just what I promise you. It did. It even took after going over my results with my doctor, that that's what was in 99% of my problems. So what would happen with me with my cue is I would have a, a monster drink in the morning if I didn't hit the gym. and I would also have a monster drink at lunch.
So my cue was the time of day or would just be the monster drink itself. My routine would be what I would do. I'd grab the monster, drink and drink it. And my reward would be what I would feel in the moment, which would be more alert. And I have a high tolerance for caffeine. So that really wasn't. I knew I would get headaches if I didn't have the caffeine.
So there's my cue, my routine and my reward. And we're gonna talk more about how I quit those in a moment in his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about layers of change, and we're gonna discuss those.
There are three layers of change
Outcomes
Processes
Identity
Outcomes is concerned with changing your results. I wanna lose weight. I wanna publish a book. I wanna win a championship. And most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change.
Then the layer of change is processes, and this level is concerned with changing your habits. Think of implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk for better workflow and developing a meditation practice are associated with processes in a layer of change. Most of the habits you build are associated with this level. It is what you do. Identity layers of change. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs, your worldview, your self image, your judgements about yourself and others, and most of the beliefs and assumptions and biases you hold are associated with this level.
They are what you believe we wanna build identity-based habits. How does one do that Kathie? I can hear you saying.
Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome based habits. The alternative is to build identity based habits.
With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become the recipe for sustained success is these two things, and this was listed in the book atomic habits by James clear. Changing your beliefs. Isn't nearly as hard as you might think. There are only two steps.
Decide what type of person you want to become.
Prove it to yourself with small wins.
First decide who you wanna be. This holds at any level as an individual, as a team. As a community and as a nation, what do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values and who do you wish to become? Now? These are big questions and many people aren't sure where to begin, but they do know what kind of results they want.
I wanna get six back abs, or I wanna feel less anxiety or maybe even double your salary. And that's fine. Start there and work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could those results ask yourself, who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want. So let me give you some real-life solutions.
Perhaps you wanna lose weight. The identity becomes the type of person who moves more every single day. A small win could be by a speedometer walk, 50 steps. When you get home from work tomorrow, walk a hundred steps. The day after that walk 150 steps. If you do this five days per week and add 50 steps each day, then by the end of the year, you'll be walking over 10,000 steps.
This reminds me from the book, The Slight Edge be 1% better today than yesterday. And you've probably heard me say that before. And I do talk about that often, and that is how you prove it to yourself with a small win.
Do you wanna become a better writer? The identity would be to become the type of person who writes 1000 words, every. A small win. Write one paragraph each day.
Do you wanna become stronger. Become the type of person who never misses a workout. Do pushups every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday would be your small win.
Wanna be a better friend. The identity would be become the type of person who always stays in touch and a small win would be call one friend every Saturday. If you repeat the same people for every three months, you'll stay close with 12 oh friends throughout the year.
You wanna be taken seriously at work. The identity would be become the type of person who is always on time. A small win would be to schedule meetings with an additional 15 minute gap between them so that you can go from meeting to meeting and always show up early. All right. You may say that's all fine and dandy and I get it. I get it. But building that identity is so important.
It's like Neville Godard teaches when he says picture the end in mind or Napoleon Hill talks about your definite chief aim. You picture yourself from the end in. I've done this recently, I made a page in my Notion where it's my dream big page and I created one for OCuSOFT I created one for my business, and I created one for my health and wellness and my personal life.
And on these pages, I've inserted pictures. I've embodied the person I wanna become in my. On these pages in my dreams. And you'd be surprised what happens when you do this. And I highly encourage you to do this. And it is in the checklist when we have a bad habit, what we wanna do is we wanna create friction for your bad habits.
What does that mean? Well, it has been said it is easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. And with awareness, which is step number one in your checklist, you know what you need to avoid to get to your winning identity? How did I make my friction and help me resist the temptation of drinking a monster drink?
Well, first of all, it was kind of easy for me because I'm like that that was affecting my health. , but I had just bought a case of monster drink. I sold those back to the person who, who, who bought them for me, because I did not want them in my house. That's a one way you can create friction. You. As it said it's easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
Let's go back to Eugene. He was one that they had to help him basically hold his hand to get him to stay away from the bacon and eggs. The bacon was clogging his arteries. He was gaining weight. He was eating breakfast, a full, big breakfast, four times the morning. What they did was they noticed what his cues were.
They said, well, it's the morning light in the house. It's the TV show that's on. It's where the, he sits in the morning. So they had to start changing his cues and it helped him resist the temptation, avoid the temptation to go fix breakfast. did try hiding his food, but when they did that, that made him angry.
And so you, your emotions play a big part on that. You don't wanna piss yourself off. Where is it? Oh, I gotta have it. , that they studied his behaviors in that book. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It was so interesting because they started going, well, he's gonna need exercise. They started encouraging him to take walks and he would get lost, but they found other ways to get his habits where he would know where he was, what he was doing.
It was extremely interesting. And to me, I geek out over that kind of stuff, because it helps with behavior modification, which is something I specialize in. And it just is, it just is very interesting. How, if we can avoid the temptation, we don't have to and create friction. And we've all heard that friction where don't have junk food in your house.
You won't eat it, but get creative, get very creative with this and, and, and start to find other ways to cue you to go to another. It, they did this with alcoholics. They did this with gamblers. They started finding out what their cues were and started changing them. And. I often encourage somebody who I see is in a, a destructive habit.
I encourage them to start finding a hobby, something that they enjoy doing and replacing it with something they enjoy doing. If that's perhaps that's photography or that is writing, there's so many different kinds of things. It's whatever you enjoy, because you will not have to re. You're just avoiding it.
And before long you'll have established another habit or what Charles Doig calls a Keystone habit. I call it a cornerstone habit because it just builds off of there and goes on and on and on finding flow where a challenge meets skill flow is the total objective of stop. The mind screw process. Flow is where challenge meets skill.
And you're just in the zone. Let's talk about that. So we wanna set clear goals. The benefits of setting goals include greater direction, greater focus, increased productivity, and higher levels of motivation setting goals that are specific and measurable. Can transform your habits. Like you would not believe they transform your mindset.
They transform your confidence and your daily actions. So set clear goals and intentions daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. We all know it. We see people do this in January for their new year's resolutions. And here's why resolutions don't work because they are not setting goals that include greater direction, greater focus, increased productivity and higher levels of motivation.
They are setting goals for outcomes that we talked about in the beginning. we wanna set goals based on our identity of who we want to become. And in the gym, it, as a trainer, that's been in the gym for 20 plus years, I can tell you that it starts in the new year and then they fall off by the end of January.
There's a statistic out there that says by the end of January, it's 65% that fall off the bandwagon. I'd probably say it's more. And then by the end of February, it's probably about 85 to 90% and we see it happen every year. Don't be that person. You wanna set your goals clearly and your intentions on the first of the week, on the first of every day, On the first of every week on the first of every month and the first of every year.
And I'd even go so far as to say at the first of every quarter and start fresh and on, I like to set my yearly goals on my birthday. And then go from my birthday to my birthday, cuz my birthday's in June and it just goes from June to June instead of being like everybody else on that bandwagon. And if you know me, you know, I'm kind of not like that.
So I like to be the black sheep and go on my own and finding flow. Harmony is the key word here. Remember harmony. Because the challenge will arise for all of us, but change your perspective on the challenge. Look at the challenge as a contribution to your success. This perspective shift will help you overcome the challenge and continue with your new skill.
It, if you look at it as harmful to your end identity, this is just helping me get there. It's just helping me get to the next step in my destination. Instead of looking it as, oh, no. And, and so many people do this. I mean, he says in the slight edge, there's only like 5% of the population who actually stick with that 1% every day when they hit the challenge, they stop.
And we've all done this as I started this episode out, it's not your fault. It's your brain's fault because it's doing this to protect you. It's your habit's fault. So when the challenge arises, look at it as harmonious your end identity. This is what I want, and this is my challenge. If I wanna lose weight and I see a hamburger right there, and I'm used to eating hamburgers.
Oh, oh, there's that challenge. there. Kathie said it was coming. Okay. How am I gonna face this challenge? Well, I'm gonna cut that hamburger in half and I'm gonna have half of it because that's what the person would do. That is where I wanna be. And I still want that hamburger and I'm not gonna deny myself.
And I'm also looking this as a contribution to my success. Remember that small win. I said, there's your small win, right? It's not if, but when you're gonna have failure, expected plan for it, or the journey to 6 31 face the setbacks. It's how you look at them. That makes all the world of difference. Have a plan for how you will react when failure arises, have a plan.
How are you gonna react? When that challenge comes up? You know, your challenges, you know, what's gonna come up and hit you. How are you going to avoid that temptation and have a plan for that? You know, the journey and the destination are one. And when you enjoy the journey and you sit back and you have a plan for how you're going to.
Still have that small win when you have that failure or you have that problem come up, it makes every, it makes a world of difference. It just does unless, but certainly not least embody the new habit, embody the new. Habit. How do we do that? Well, first of all, we already start doing that when we base our identity on who we want to become, you start doing that in your imagination, you embody the new habit and you become autotelic.
I like to think of autotelic as becoming one with your intuition, with your higher being, with your guide, whatever it is. Aspects of an autotelic personality are this, your goals are intrinsic. They come from the inside. We talked about intrinsic motivation, a few videos ago, and I'll put a link in the show notes, but when your goals come from the inside, you're embodying the habit, have it.
You're embodying the person you want to become. Your work is immersive. You become lost in your work. You don't even know what time it is. You're just having fun, even though it may be challenging, you're still having a good time. You get lost in it. Your attention is unwavering. I have a fellow entrepreneur who her newer, who comes out and she says specifically, I am ADHD.
there's so much wrong with that sentence. I can't even tell you, is she ADHD? Yeah, probably, but she's embodied that so much that she's let it affect her attention and her attention is wavering. Again, it's not her fault. She doesn't even know that that's her bad habit. She's enabled that identity of who that is.
instead of taking her power back and realizing when you embody the new habit, your attention becomes unwavering. And finally work is inherently enjoyable. And I don't even like to use that word work because it does not work. It's fun. So your goals are intrinsic. Your fun is immersive. Your attention is unwavering and your fun is inherent.
Enjoy. when we say embody the new habit. I want you to think of an athlete. I want you to think of an athlete because a professional athlete embodies the sport. Watch 'em play the game. Watch 'em have the skill. Do they always hit the home run? No. Do they always strike out all the batters? No, it doesn't happen that way.
Cool. They know that they're going to have challenges. They know they're going to have failures, but they embody the habit in the book. The power of habit. Charles Duheg tells the story about Michael Phelps, the swimmer. And the Olympics and you can look up the story and I will actually link it in the show notes and the description, but what Michael Phelps happened to him is he got water in his goggles during one of his biggest competitions.
Actually, I think it was his biggest competition. And when that happened, he had embodied the sport so much in the habit. So much of swimming that. That he knew how many strokes it took, how many breaths it took, how many kicks it took. He embodied the person. He needed to be two. Number one. He not only won that race, but he set a new world record with water in his goggles.
That's one of the worst things that can happen to a swimmer.
I also like to think of my favorite baseball player, Jose Altuve. He was part of the cheating scandal back in 2017. Supposedly I, I don't know. Uh, but let me tell you something, that guy has heart. He embodies the sport. He gets booed every, at every stadium, he had a microphone on him.
At the, one of the games on, we were on national television and he was micd up during the game and the announcer. And I've heard Jose Altuve already answer this question before, but the announcer asked him how he handled the boos. He goes, you're fixing to go to New York and you know, they're going to boo you.
How do you handle that? His answer? Was immaculate. I love how they love their team. That's what he said. They love their team. It wasn't, he, he's not making it about him. My friend, the power is there. It's not about you. It's not your fault that your habit is bad. It's not his fault that people are booing him.
And that is what makes him AIC. That's what makes him embody the sport. All right. That's my episode for today. If you wanna copy of the mind map, be sure to go to www.kathieowen.com/mindmap as well as I also have a. Hot habit checklist that is at www.kathieowen.com/habit. All will be in the show notes, all will be in the description.
And if you know someone who can benefit from today's episode, please share it with them. And until next time I'll see you next. Peace out and Namaste.
