Design Habits That Last: Self Compassionate Habit Building

1. Introduction: This is the class for you if you have tried to create healthy habits before, but you haven't been successful, you have a healthy habit, you've been trying to bring into your life, but you've been struggling to maintain it or you have a habit that you want to start but you don't actually know where to kickoff when it comes to bringing that habit into your life. By the end of this class, you will be filled with motivation to take action. You will have a deep dive habit plan, and you'll have complete clarity around what your next steps are. The thing that this habit class does differently is that I'm not just going to be teaching you about habits because there are plenty of resources for that. You're actually going to be picking a habit, creating a detailed plan for that habit. It's going to be fueled by self-compassion, experimentation, and flexibility. The three core ingredients that I find are most often missing when it comes to creating habits. The time that you invest in this class is the difference between creating an ongoing, life changing, sustainable habit, thus a half-baked habit that you keep up for a brief period of time and then slowly forget about. 2. Class Project : The project for today's class is to complete the habit plan workbook that goes alongside the videos. Each video in this class is going to walk you through a portion of the workbook, so we'll be working through it together. There will be examples, there will be step-by-step guidance. The beauty of having a resource is that every time you go to build a new habit, you can go back to that workbook and create a new habit plan. If you want instructions on how to download your workbook, check out the description for this class. Download the workbook to get started, and in the fast activity, we'll be choosing the habit that has the biggest impact on your life. 3. Choosing The Habit With The Biggest Impact : In this exercise, you will be choosing the habit that will have the biggest impact on your life and you'll finish this exercise with complete confidence that you're prioritizing the right thing. You might have come into this class with an idea of what habit you want to work on, but I want to ask you to put that on hold just for a moment. You can absolutely go back to it but humor me with this exercise because you might find yourself changing your mind completely. In your workbook, you'll see that you have a page dedicated to brainstorming your habits, and it focuses on two types of habits. Firstly, there are push habits, and secondly, you have value-based habits. These are the two most impactful type of habits that you can bring into your life. The first type of habit that you'll be brainstorming is a push habit. A push habit is something that creates more time and money, a better mindset, or more energy, making your other goals easier to accomplish or achieves multiple goals through a domino or chain effect. For example, a habit of pitching 10 clients per week, it might lead to more income. That income could lead you to hire a cleaning service or a meal delivery service. With that extra time that you free up, not having to make your own meals and not having to do your cleaning, you finally have time to go to the gym in the afternoon and so on and so forth. That's an example of a push goal that creates more money, that then allows you to achieve your other goals with more ease. Another example is that you might decide to embrace a healthy eating habit. You stop purchasing fresh food from the grocery store, which saves you money. You have more energy from healthy meals, so you're able to take on bigger projects at work, moving you towards your promotion. You feel that also you get out of the house and you meet more people. There is a chain effect from focusing on that one healthy eating habit, to find what push habits would make the most difference in your life, ask yourself two questions. What habits could you bring into your life that build momentum for other positive changes? What habits create energy, time, money, or give you a significantly better mindset that allows you to achieve other goals? The second type of habit that you're going to be brainstorming in your workbook are value-based habits. The reason that value-based habits are so impactful is because firstly, these are usually things that you're going to enjoy doing a lot more than a regular habit that you pick out of thin air and there is power in enjoying the process. Secondly, the more that you are practicing your values, the happier you are going to be in life. The happier that you are in your life, the easier you'll find it to practice other healthy habits. An example of a value-based habit is if you've always loved to learn and you also love to read, then, you start a habit of 10 minutes of reading per day, you'll probably find that a lot easier to sustain than someone who doesn't value learning. Use your values to your advantage. Value-based habits and push habits can absolutely have overlap. For example, a habit of reading and taking notes for 30 minutes per day for me as a content creator, makes my content creation easier. It makes you feel more inspired. It makes me feel more motivated to create content. There's absolutely a knock-on effect of that habit. If you don't know your values, I'd recommend checking out my class. Design a life that you want for exercises, for clarity, and motivation, we deep dive into how to find your specific values in that class. Keep in mind that the values that you're writing down are going to be the most actionable values. For example, the value of authenticity is a little bit harder to turn into a habit. Whereas the value of health or learning have a lot of habit-like behaviors that sit underneath them. For example, if one of your values is learning, you might read 10 pages of a book a day. You might watch a Skillshare class every week. You could listen to a podcast episode on your morning commute. Now that you've brainstormed, you've opened up your mind to alternative habits, take a look through all of the ideas that you've written down and lean towards the habit that firstly has a big knock-on effect that you think will have a chain effect in your life, and secondly, you think is actually going to be sustainable for you. This will be the habit that you'll focus on for the rest of the class. 4. Re-Imagining Your Habit: In the lifestyle design thinking world they promote the odyssey plan, maintaining that one of the best ways to design your life is to design your lives. Instead of creating one ultimate vision for your life, the odyssey plan encourages you to create three different visions. This isn't a tiered situation, each vision is a vision that appeals to you, that you're interested in pursuing. Of course, you can only live out one vision at a time, but this is an exercise in creative thinking and problem-solving. It gets you out of the very narrow frame that you often have when it comes to thinking about your future. The same applies to your habits. Often when you're thinking about your habits, you have a very narrow frame of what they're going to look like. For example, you decide that you are going to get healthy and your brain latches on to the idea that the only way to get healthy is to show up to the gym at 6:00 AM every morning for a one-hour workout. But in reality, going to the gym at 6:00 AM may be a terrible way to achieve your goal of getting healthy. If you're an intense introvert that doesn't like the idea of seeing people at 6:00 AM in the morning, that's not going to be sustainable. If you're a night owl and most of your energy comes to you at night, it's going to be hard to sustain a habit of a 6:00 AM gym workout. The goal of getting healthy can be achieved in so many ways outside of waking up at 6:00 AM and going to the gym, but because your narrow frame when it came to your habit, you lost out on an opportunity to get to know yourself better and to learn how to get healthy in a way that works for your mind and for your body. The great thing about re-imagining your habit is that you also step into an experimentation and learning mindset. The first version of your habit might be to brain dump for 10 minutes of the morning time, but if after performing that for a little while you find that it just leads to rumination and upset, you couldn't move on to the second imagine version of your habit to see if that's a better fit. A lot of research has been done on performance only goals vs learning goals. For example, a goal of going to the gym five times per week vs a goal of learning how to best move your body in a way that is enjoyable and sustainable. Unsurprisingly, if you're approaching your habit with curiosity and with an open mind, you are much more likely to be successful and to sustain your habit. By mapping out multiple futures of your habits, you're opening your mind and you're almost creating an explorer's approach when it comes to your habit building process. Using your workbook, write down the very first version of your habit. This will probably be the version of your habit that you already had in mind. If you haven't already, you want to get specific and you want to get actionable when it comes to writing down your habits. For example, if you are working on the habit of journaling, you might write down something like, "Each morning I get up, I pull out my notebook and I write my three stream of consciousness morning pages." You want to almost get visual when it comes to your description of you performing your habit. Get into the nitty gritty detail. As you write down the second version of your habit, imagine that that first version is off the table. It's no longer accessible to you. What do you do instead? For example, for the second version of a journaling habit, you might write, "Each night before I go to bed, I write down 10 things that I'm grateful for." For the third version of your habit, once again imagine that those first two options are off the table. They have been removed as options. How do you approach your habit differently? It might be a different time, but it could also be in a completely different way. For a third version of your journaling habit, you might write down, "Each morning I get up, I set a 10 minute timer and I journal on my goals and my vision." Please use these as examples only. As you're writing out the different futures for your habit, think about you specifically. What you're drawn towards, what you're most interested in, what is more sustainable for you. There are some habits that are a bit more stagnant, that are harder to apply this activity to. For example, taking your vitamins every morning or drinking a certain amount of water. There are a few little different ways to switch it up, but keep in mind that those habits probably don't give you as many options as habits like exercise or journaling. In your workbook, you're going to see a space where you can rate each version of your habits on three factors. Firstly, resources. Do you have the time, the skills, the money to perform your habit in this way? Secondly, appeal. How much does performing your habit in this way appeal to you? Thirdly, sustainability. How confident do you feel that you could sustain this habit? Rate each version of your habit and then choose the version of your habit that has the best rating. 5. Your One Sentence Why: In this exercise, you are going to be creating a one-sentence of why for your habit. Most people when they approach creating a why, create a lengthy detailed look into the impact of their habit, that they never go back to, that they never use as a source of information, that becomes relatively useless. In this exercise, you're going to be creating a clear single source of motivation why. You need to think of your why as an energy source and when you are picking your energy source, you want it to be high-quality and you want it to be a lasting energy source. The right why energizes us, it sustains us and it motivates us; and the wrong why, drains us and it demotivates us. In a Yale University study on 10,000 cadets in the US Military Academy, they looked at the internal motives that each cadet had for enlisting and how that impacted their professional success over time. They wanted to see whether having both internal motives and external motives resulted in more success or whether it actually diluted motivation. An example of an internal motive for enrolling in the Military Academy might be because enrolling feels personally meaningful to the individual. An example of an external motive might be to seek professional success and to seek career advancement. Consistently, they found that having a personally meaningful reason to enroll led to more positive outcomes. However, when someone had a personally meaningful reason alongside an externally motivated reason, it diluted those positive outcomes. Another study on nutrition and children reported a similar finding. A group of children were given a snack and they were either told that the snack was yummy, that the snack would make them strong, or that the snack was yummy and would make them strong. What they found was that the kids who were told that the snack was yummy and the snack would make them strong, consistently ate less and enjoyed the snack less than the children who were just told that the snack was yummy. These findings support the idea that having multiple motivation sources for your why can undermine your success. For example, a multiple motivation why for exercise might be, "I want to exercise so that I can look a certain way, so that I can feel more energized, so that I can move more freely, and so that I can pick up my kids with ease". A single motivation why for exercise might look like, "I want to exercise so that I can feel energized everyday." It's clear, it's focused, and it gives you one source of motivation to go back to whenever you're feeling demotivated. When you are writing down your why in your workbook, you don't want to write down multiple paragraphs. You want one sentence that has a very clear single motivation source. As you write down your why, aim to keep your focus on how your habit will make you feel or what you're going to experience, so that it's an internally focused why. Thus an externally focused why, which is more about how you want to appear to others and what you will gain. For example, I want to write a book so that I can create a magical world that I can lose myself in creatively is an internally focused why. It's all about what you want to experience. A why of, "I want to write a book so that I can get on the New York Times bestseller list, or I want to write a book so that I can make 100k," is an example of an externally motivated why. It's a why that's less likely to keep you going over the long haul. Michelle Segar, a behavioral sustainability scientist, wrote the book called No Sweat, which focuses on building exercise-based habits. In her book, she talks about how the best why focuses on immediate and noticeable benefits. Whys that are distant, that are abstract, that are clinical, don't usually feel imperative enough to drive us in the now, and that's why weight loss often fails to motivate people long-term. For example, in a study where she looked at a group of individuals that were exercising more, she found the participants that had whys around better health which is a vague why and weight loss were the ones who exercised the least out of the study. No matter how reasonable or logical our why might be, if it doesn't provide us some immediate gratification, some noticeable benefit, it's going to be much harder for us to maintain that habit. A good why outlines a concrete way your life is going to be enhanced. Using your workbook, design your why keeping those three factors in mind. Number 1, your why should provide one motivation source. Number 2, focus on how you want to feel or what you want to experience. Number 3, focus on a concrete, relatively quick way that your life will be enhanced by performing your habit. 6. Creating Flexibility : One of the main reasons that people give up on their new habits, is because they start to find them a little too difficult to maintain. They hit a busy day, is they hit pause on their habit, and then they do the same the next day, and then the next, and so on and so forth. Because there's absolutely no flexibility. In this exercise, you are going to be adding some flexibility to your habits so that they remain sustainable even when life gets busy and you're going to do that using the comparison effect. Something that car salesmen do when they are selling cars, is they anchor the price. A car might be $50,000 but because they like you, they'll give it to you for $35,000. $35,000, sounds like a really good deal until you find out that the car in fact is only worth 30k. The only reason that it sounded like a good deal was because of that price anchor, that comparison to the original $50,000. You'll see the same concept in a different way in places like ice cream stores, you've got the medium ice cream, it's $5.50. But the large ice cream is so much bigger and it's only $ extra, so you may as well go for the large. The comparison fact is really powerful and you can use it when you're building your habits. If you've ever looked into the world of habit building, you might have heard of mini habits. Mini habits are tiny, tiny versions of whatever habit you're trying to build. You might do one push-up after you get up out of bed, or you might force one tool knots in the harbor of building a bigger habit eventually, and in grading that habit in your mind. But if you've ever tried many habits, you might have noticed that despite how small they are, you could still notice some resistance in you to perform them. That's where the comparison effect can come in handy. By creating habits based on your energy and your time, you can use the comparison effect to your advantage. For a meditation habit, you might have a three-tiers and these are based on your time, energy, and engagement levels. Tier level 1 might just be doing a quick box breath, so under one minute, very quick and easy for you to do. That's your mini habit. Tier number 2 might be doing a 10 minute guided meditation on your favorite meditation app. Tier number 3, might be more challenging. Going out and doing a walking meditation. Some days you're going to wake up and you will be filled with energy and you will want a challenge and you will go for tier 3. Some days you'll wake up and you won't feel so fabulous. You might be short on time and you'll go for tier 1. It doesn't really matter as long as you are keeping up your habit. When you are designing your lowest tier habit in your workbook, ask yourself the question, could I do this even if I were hungover. That's the standard that you want to measure your lower-tier habit by. You want it to be incredibly easy to perform when it comes to your higher tier habit, you do want to make it semi challenging. You want it to be a habit that you perform on a day when you feel really good, you feel your best. However, when you took it off, it feels like a win. For your middle tier, think on an average day with the average amount of time that I have, is this habit doable? Take some time in your workbook to design that there's habit tiers. That way you almost have a menu of sorts to go back to on a daily basis when you're performing your habit. 7. Making your habit easier: In this part of the class, we are going to be taking your habit, making it easier to do, making it more appealing, and I hear it more likely to happen. In James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, he writes, when scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren't all that different from those who are struggling. Instead disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. This part of the class is very focused on structuring your life in a way that doesn't require you to have a tremendous amount of willpower in order to perform your habit on a regular basis, by keeping your habits sustainable. The first thing that you're going to consider in your workbook is how you can make your habit easier to start because starting is the most important part to concentrate on. If you've ever been to a coverage sale, you might have noticed that people that have rummage boxes on the floor simply do not perform as well as people with hangers that it easy to look through. If a person at a coverage sale wanted to do well, they would do everything in their power to make it obvious what they had for sale and to make it easy for someone to start the act of browsing through their items. Similarly, if you want your habit to be sustainable, you need to do everything in your power to make your habit obvious and to make your habit incredibly easy to start doing. The magic in most of the actions that fill up your day is in the very start of each of those actions. You might need to motivate yourself to get up and brush your teeth. But once you've started, it's not like you need too much motivation to keep yourself going. It's all in the start. You might need to motivate yourself to get up and put the dishes away, but once you've started, you can keep on going without having to constantly pep yourself to keep on going. If you can get the start of your habit down, you are setting yourself up for success. To make starting a habit easier, there are three things that you can concentrate on. Firstly, piggybacking your habit onto a consistent behavior in your day. Secondly, giving your habit strong cues that tap into as many senses as you can. Thirdly, removing as many steps as possible between you and your habit. For example, if you want to journal in the morning, three things that you could do to make that easier are piggybacking that onto the consistent behavior of waking up in the morning, creating a strong visual cue of having your journal beside your bed, and making it easier to start by removing the step of having to grab a pen by putting a pen on your bedside table. In your workbook, you are going to have some space designed at the very start of your habit. Give this the attention that it deserves because this really could it make or break your habit. The next thing to consider when you are building your habit is how to make your habit more appealing. To make a habit more appealing, it's all about creating more of a reward within performing the habit. When you're trying to make your habit more appealing, what you really want to focus on is just making it more rewarding for you to do. If you've ever tried, for example, giving yourself a piece of chocolate after a run to try and make that habit more imbedded, you'll know that your brain very quickly understand that it can in fact get that piece of chocolate, even if there is no run. Adding a reward after a habit isn't the most effective way to do things. What you need to do is create reward within the activity itself and some habits from the get-go are rewarding in themselves. If you value running and you're building a habit of read 10 pages a day, that probably is going to be rewarding enough for you. But if you're starting, for example, an exercise habit and you've never worked out in your life, then it's going to be a little harder for you to find that rewarding from the get-go. To make a habit more appealing, there are a few things that you can do. Firstly, you can get fascinated by it. Ian Bogost, a game designer who brought the book Play Anything, talked about making habits more appealing by getting fascinated by them in his book. He made mowing his lawn more fun for himself by asking a bunch of questions. When is the best time for me to mow my lawn? What is the best route as I mow my lawn, and what is the best grass? How can I make my grass look absolutely amazing? Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable goes back to the quote; the cure for boredom is curiosity. In your workbook, consider picking one question to lead your fascination. For example, it may just be, what is the most interesting form of exercise for me? What's an exercise that I actually enjoy? It may be, what is the best way to exercise? What is the most efficient way to exercise? You want to pick just one question that you can focus your fascination on. The second way to make a habit more rewarding or appealing is to add constraints. If we are on the same side of Tiktok, there is a girl who occasionally shows up and she shares her rules for her days. She also has rules for things like going to the movies and having a crazy night. For example, must be freshly showered and comfy, must give someone a compliment, must have a bag of M&M's. Animator Chuck Jones also did this for Road Runner. Some of his rules were: no outside force can harm the coyote, no dialogue ever, except for beep beep, the coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by their failures. Some of the time, those rules were broken, which is fine. But for the most part, they stuck to these roles that they created for the Road Runner. Consider if you can create some rules or constraints for your habits in order to make them more enjoyable and more engaging. We space in your workbook if this is something that you want to do. Some constraints that you can create for a workout might be all workouts must be done within 30 minutes. I can never put any effort into my appearance for my workouts. That also makes things easier to start. I save all of my best podcasts for my workouts. That also adds more reward within the activity itself. The third way that you can make a habit more rewarding is to layer it with another activity. You would have seen a lot of examples of this around. For example, some people will watch Netflix while they're on the treadmill. The next thing that you're going to be considering within your workbook is how can you make this habit more likely to happen? This is highly focused on accountability. I will say that some people thrive when they have accountability. Some people wither, you know yourself best. If you are able too sure where you sit on the spectrum, look back into your history when you've had any accountability with your habits and think about whether it actually helped you or whether it more so hindered you. There are two things that I like to focus on when it comes to accountability. The first one is pre-committing with money. For example, pre-committing by buying a package of exercise clause subscriptions or paying for a personal trainer up front. You could also use the service like beeminder.com, which actually takes your money if you fail to complete your habits. The second way to create accountability is to pre-commit with an individual. You could ask your friend to follow up with you and say, "Hey, did you get all of your workouts done this week?" You could also ask a friend if they will work out with you so that you feel like you have to show up to your exercise classes. There's a little more pressure on you. You can commit to sending someone a daily workout photo to give them evidence that you are in fact working out. You could also use a service like focusmate.com, which matches you out with accountability partners all around the world. In your workbook, you want to answer those three questions and apply them to your habit. Firstly, how could you make this habit easier to start? How could you make your habit more appealing? How can you make your habit more likely to happen? 8. Bounce Back Planning: In this exercise, you are going to be creating a bounce back plan for your habit that is fueled by self-compassion and an [inaudible] mindset. Along this journey with your habit, you are going to stumble, and I'm not so worried about you stumbling. I think stumbling is very normal when you are trying to keep up, start a new habit. However, I'm also worried about how you will react to yourself stumbling because that's where people go wrong. Behavior change can be hard and stumbling, skipping a habit, it's normal, especially when you're just starting to maintain it. What matters the most is learning how to bounce back with self-compassion. Let's take a look at what stumbling might look like through a behavior change when we look at self-critic Sam. Sam has decided to give up coffee, and have a really good reason why. It makes their stomach feel off. It makes them anxious. But then their colleague offers them a coffee and they say, yes, almost instinctually. They sit there after drinking their coffee and they wallow. They feel miserable, they're angry at themselves, they didn't stick to their new behavior change of giving up coffee The next day, a friend, ask them if they want to go for a coffee date and they were like, screw it. I already did it yesterday, I'm just going to do it again. They fall back into the pattern of drinking coffee very quickly. Now let's look at self-compassionate Sarah. Self-compassionate Sarah, also giving up coffee, has a really good reason why. Her colleague offers her a coffee. Almost instinctually, she says, yes. She drinks the coffee, and afterward, she gets really curious. She's like, "What made me feel like I needed to accept that coffee? Why did I forget that I'd given up coffee? What could I do differently next time? How do I want to react to that in the future? Is there a reason that I really feel like I need coffee?" She considers whether she should replace her morning coffee instead of just cutting it out completely. Maybe she'll do a healthy hot chocolate recipe that she saw online. Instead of getting angry at herself, she's pretty self-compassionate. In her mind, she's saying things like, it's pretty normal to mock up a habit when you're first starting. Lots of people stumble when they are kicking off a new, pretty significant behavior change. This isn't really such a big deal. The next day, she tries making her healthy hot chocolate recipe and she finds that it's a really good replacement for her coffee. Her habit continues. How you respond to stumbles is incredibly important throughout the habit process. You want to be much more like self-compassionate Sarah, than you are like self-critic Sam. Firstly, because one way is just much nicer to yourself, and secondly, because one way you just get much better results. To support this mindset, let's look at the transtheoretical model of behavior change just for fun. They've looked at this model in relation to a whole bunch of different significant behavior changes, like consistent contraceptive use, dietary changes, and stopping smoking. What they've found is that most people at any given time, fit in one of the stages on the screen when it comes to new habit building. It also says that you are very unlikely to follow a [inaudible] Most people do not go from not performing a habit at all, to being a master, incredibly consistent with that habit. Most people actually recycle through these stages several times before the behavior becomes embedded. The stages of the model that you'll find yourself recycling through are: firstly, pre-contemplation. For example, you've been thinking, I probably should start exercising. You can be here for a really long time. You might be here for years. Then there's contemplation. You intend to start working out within the next six months or so. There's preparation. You're definitely going to start on Monday. You've gone to the store, you've gotten all of your gear, you're ready to go. There's action. You're going to classes, you're doing the work. Then there's maintenance mode. You're just maintaining your habit of working out at this point and you have been for over six months. What they found is that discouragement or the occasional slip is what causes people to halt the habit process. But when people treat the slips as opportunities to learn as well as treat themselves with self-kindness when they slip up, they are much more likely to move through the cycle. Self-compassionate change encourages normalizing struggle because struggle is normal. The more that you see struggle as an enemy to the process and less of a part of the process, the more difficulty you're going to have sustaining a habit. In your workbook, what you'll be doing, it's actually designing a response to when you slip up. You're going to be preparing for the eventual slip-up that you will face. There are three sections to this in your workbook, starting with treating yourself with kindness. Kristin Neff, the leading authority on self-compassion has found that when we treat ourselves like we would a good friend, when we fail or when we make mistakes, we are more able to see ourselves clearly and make healthy changes in our life. A few questions that can prompt self-compassion are, why would a good person have done this? For example, why would a good person have missed a day of practicing French? Why would a good person have missed a workout of an afternoon? How would a good friend speak to you if they found out that you missed your workout or that you missed a day of practice? How can I comfort and care for myself in this moment? You might want to write down a few kind phrases that you can say to yourself when you do stumble, things like, everyone goes through this, everyone stumbles. This is incredibly normal. It's not the end of the world. You'll be able to get back to it, I believe in you. In your workbook, as you're designing your bounce-back plan, write down some self-compassionate phrases that you'll go back to when you find that you have stumbled with your habit. The second part of your bounce back plan that you're going to be designing is learning from your resistance. If you find that you're skipping your habits frequently, but there haven't been any big changes in your life, it's not that your life has gotten particularly busy, there's probably some internal resistance that it's a good idea to look into. Your resistance is usually telling you something, but sometimes it can be a bit muffled. At times, it can be incredibly clear. It might just be saying, I hate this form of workout. Why are we doing this on a daily basis? My body doesn't enjoy it. It could also be something a bit more vague like I just feel so trapped. This feels pointless. I'm confused. What am I supposed to be doing? Why are we doing this? Finding out what it is that your resistance is trying to tell you is the first step towards moving forward. To do that, what you want to do is to get into the practice on resistance journaling. Prompt yourself with questions like, why didn't I work? What did I feel like was stopping me? What is causing this resistance in my body? What could I do differently next time? How might I approach this in a way that is more enjoyable? How can I create a clear way? Or, is this something that I should be doing? Or, should I be focusing on a different habit? In your workbook, you'll actually have a list of questions that you can ask yourself as part of your bounce back plan when you do find yourself stumbling on a more consistent basis without reason. The third step of your bounce back plan is going to be experimentation through action. After you journal on your resistance, you want to put in place any changes that you've proposed. Instead of going to the gym before work, you should go after work. Instead of going to pilates classes, you could try dance classes. Instead of doing a traditional meditation, you might try a walking meditation. This is all about experimenting. Experimentation doesn't really stop. You might find that a routine or a habit works really well in one phase of your life, but in the next phase, you need to start experimenting again because it doesn't quite work for you. If you follow this bounce back plan every time that you find yourself stumbling or struggling to keep up with a habit, you are going to be so much more self-compassionate, self-aware, and understanding of yourself. As a result, you will be most successful. 9. Final Thoughts, Extra Resources: Congratulations on making your way through this entire class. You are incredible. I hope that you found the exercises within this class as helpful as I had found them when applying them to my own habits. The idea behind this class is for it to exist so that whenever you want to make a change in your behavior, whenever you want to introduce a new habit, you can go right back to it and you can utilize the accompanying workbook for your new habit. If you are comfortable with being a little bit vulnerable and sharing your work to inspire someone else, I would love it if you would share some of your habit plan to give other people inspiration for this class. If someone is working on the same habit or they're just having some trouble finding out ways to make their habit easier to start or more engaging is so helpful to have examples to look at. While I've tried to provide some of those within my workbook, there is seriously never enough when it comes to examples. If you are like me and you are absolutely fascinated by behavior change, I do have a few resources that I'd love to recommend to you that have definitely informed portions of this class. To begin with, if you are building a workout habit, a book that you absolutely must read is titled No Sweat, the simple science of motivation that can bring you a lifetime of fitness. This is the single most impactful book that I have read around behavior change as it applies to movement. But honestly, most of the learnings can be applied to building any kind of habit. It's an incredible book. Secondly, Elastic Habits by Stephen Guise, that is an incredible book that applies self-compassionate behavior change and really focuses on flexibility. If you crave variety and flexibility in your routines and if you do have any attention difficulty, I would highly recommend this book. Thirdly, Atomic Habits by James Clear is an incredible foundational habit-building book. Lastly, Finish, Give Yourself the Gift of Done, is a great book to read. It's not so much focused around habits, but it is highly focused on bouncing back and following through and you can absolutely apply it to your habit-building journey. Thank you so much again, and I will see you soon. 10. (Optional Bonus) Creating Variety: This is a quick little bonus video for those of you who are the type of person who really enjoys variety in their habits. So if you're someone who finds that you get bored of your habits very easily, this will be a helpful extra exercise for you. Hedonic adaptations as we are exposed to similar stimuli on a regular basis even if that stimuli is engaging and it is enjoyable, we grow bored of it. Switching things up can re-engage you, and that is what this exercise is all about. In this burnout part of the class, you will be creating a habit menu to go alongside those habit tiers that you have already created. But this route B is so much about time and energy available. It'll be more so about what you feel like doing on the day when giving your habits some variety. So for example, if you were to create a variety menu for a habit like exercise, on one hand, you could go on a 25-minute walk. But you might also want to dance to a few songs, or you might want to do a bunch of push-ups. So you're giving yourself options that help you to keep yourself engaged. Instead of doing just a daily recap journal every day, you could choose between doing a daily recap journal, a gratitude journal, or a daily brain dump. You might actually want to revisit the re-imagining your habits section of this class to give yourself some inspiration. If there were other ideas that you were drawn to, you can bring them into your habit menus. This also gives you a really good way to start experimenting. If you're not sure which habit is more sustainable for you, which habit you're going to enjoy doing the most, you can give yourself some options. Keep in mind that some habits simply don't have very many options for you to choose from. If you have a habit that you're trying to form, like drink water, or take your vitamins, there really aren't too many options for you, but there are plenty of habits that this will apply to. In your workbook, you will see an example of a habit menu that includes a time and energy-based menu as well as a variety menu. Head on to your workbook and get that habit that menu filled out if you are someone who craves variety in your habits.