The Habit Rock Pile

Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey. Even the stuff you don’t want to hear, habits are like rocks we’re trying to carry across the field. So I was trying to think about making habit changes as we set new goals and how we usually approach habit change and why we often find that we can’t maintain the habits we’re trying to create and the times that we actually are successful. Not to mention even recognizing why certain bad habits are so easy to keep repeating and so hard to break. In thinking about all this, I came up with this visual that really helped me and I wanted to share it with all of you. It was this idea that we have these different size, big rocks, medium stones, small stones and pebbles all sitting in a pile, and we have this bag that we can use and carry about five pounds across this field, and we need to get ’em across the field to reach our goal, and we want to do this as efficiently as possible.

(00:59):
Most of the time, we don’t want to take extra long to reach our goal. So looking at this pile, I think a lot of times we go, okay, well I’m going to carry the big rocks across first, get as many as I can, and that way I’m doing it when I’m freshest, I’m getting these heavy things out of the way. So if we go to picking up the big rocks, which are those habits I think are often hard, most outside our comfort zone. They’re the ones we think, well, I can do this right now. So motivated. They’re the ones that are sacrifices that we feel like we’re kind of will powering our way through. It’s tracking macros when we’ve always said tracking macros is so overwhelming and we’re going to do it perfectly. It’s the two a day workouts. It’s some of these really intense changes that we make.

(01:34):
This all or nothing attitude type habits, those are the big rocks. And so we go and we put a couple in the bag and either A, we can’t pick it up, so we never actually get started. So overwhelmed with the weight of it, or we get halfway across the field and all of a sudden the bag ripped because it couldn’t carry that weight, and now we can’t even go back and start carrying the other rocks across in any efficient manner. That’s how we often approach habit changes, trying to do these big, overhauling heavy changes that weigh us down and ultimately sabotage us when we run out of that initial motivation and willpower. It’s like we had all this passion and then this passion bomb exploded on us and we couldn’t do anymore. So if you go back to that pile, we now have the medium stones, the small stones, the small pebbles, the medium and small stones we could carry a lot more of, but still, again, it might take us a little bit longer to go across.

(02:22):
These habits are things that might be a little uncomfortable but easier to do, or they might take a little bit more effort, be harder to do, but are more comfortable for us. So thinking about things like if you say working out, working out is technically hard, but if you like doing it, you might be like, this is the thing I can always do. I can’t change my diet, but I can change my workouts. Well, you’re comfortable being uncomfortable in that way. It’s technically a hard thing. You’re just comfortable making changes. So we have habits like that. We also have habits that for some reason we really just don’t like doing. We’re not comfortable doing, even though they’re so easy to do. Not even fitness related. I equate this to doing laundry. It’s not really that hard to do, not even that time consuming, but I hate doing it.

(03:05):
So we all have those habits. It might be meal prepping for you, it might be drinking more water, but those are sort of the medium stones and small stones, and we can get those across. But if we’re only carrying those across, it’s not that efficient. There’s times where we put too much weight in and we bog ourselves down or results don’t happen fast enough, so we lose motivation and we give up because we feel like we’re not there yet. Same thing can sort of be said for those small pebbles. These are the habits that barely push your comfort zone. They’re the really easy 1% changes, and while they can really add up, but we might even be able to carry a whole lot of them across in one go. This is often where we’re like, unless we’re really embracing sustainable changes, we’re like, Ugh, nothing’s adding up because these aren’t sexy.

(03:45):
They don’t feel like these massive changes for us. So it doesn’t give us that feeling of doing more. It’s often the things we really need to do, but again, it makes us not as efficient or create as fast a change. It’s sustainable, but we still have those other hard habits we might need to embrace. Sometimes it can help us work our way up to them, but we still have all this diversity of habit change we have to make. And we have only so much willpower. We have only so much motivation. We have only so many ways we can shift our priorities. So how can we manage to make habit changes that actually last? This is where you have to think about efficiency in that bag. What’s one hard habit change you can make? Put that into the bag. How can I fit some medium stones and small stones of bear on that big rock?

(04:28):
So how can I include some habit changes that are maybe a little less comfortable but easy to do technically or a little harder to do, but I’m more comfortable with sort of around that? And then how can I put in some 1% changes around that for maybe one of the other big rocks I can’t carry yet? So I’m using all that space efficiently. If I’m combining all these different types of habits into one bag, I’m going to make it across the field as fast as possible. And I might even be able to then say, Hey, I can actually take two of these big rocks. They’re not quite as big in the next go. And you might be able to do a little bit more, be willing to make a few more sacrifices. You are really motivated, or you might hit a time of year, be a little fatigued carrying the rocks across and recognize, Hey, I don’t have the same focus and intensity.

(05:12):
I’m fatigued mentally, even fatigued with the habit changes. I’m going to carry a few more small pebbles in this go. But that way you’re always moving across and you’re moving across as efficiently as possible. You’re keeping that forward with momentum towards your goal. Well, recognizing that different habits have different hard for us and that we can’t just always go at one speed, carrying only one weight of a habit, and that that’s also what sabotaged us. And along the way, we might get lucky and even find a sledgehammer where we can break down some of the big rocks into smaller stones that are more manageable for us to get across. But the more we look at our habit changes not just as one size, one type of habit, but as this diversity, the more we can really assess who we are, what we need, even at this stage season of life, time of the year, to be able to carry across those habits, to be able to use those habits to move forward towards our goal in the most efficient manner possible.

(06:05):
Love to hear your thoughts on this. Hope this really helped you embrace habit changes and even assess some of the habits you’re currently doing to see are these big rocks that are really hard and am I doing too many of them to sabotage myself and overwhelm myself and run out of willpower? Or am I only sticking with the small pebbles? And that’s maybe why, yes, this feels sustainable, but I’m not seeing results snowball as fast as I’d like, and I’m losing motivation because of that. Can I incorporate some of the small stones and some of the medium stones into this to really be efficient in how I’m seeing results happen and be able to get everything moving forward towards my goal a little bit faster?

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.