5 Easy Hacks to Build Focused Consistency

 

1. Know your why. Why do you want to start an exercise routine or eat healthier food? Knowing your why and keeping it in front of you is going to help you with consistency. Whenever I am struggling in remaining consistent with one of my health habits, it really helps me to write it out. I like to journal about why I want it and list all the ways I’m going to feel and what my life is like after I’ve developed that consistency. I also like to write a short statement (or affirmation) about it and post it around where I will see it throughout my day.

2. Pick your battles. We all have a limited capacity to maintain discipline and good decision making. Everyone has a threshold for being able to maintain discipline and good decision. And let’s be real here, it is different for each of us.

My recommendation for you is to explore your limits and really notice at what point during the day you begin to fall off on your discipline or start to make decisions that you later regret or wish you had gone another way. Once you start to know what your limit is it will be much easier for you to know what you need to do to stay on track. You will be able to pick your battles and learn when to take a step back and start fresh later.

Here are a couple of tips until you have figured out your personal limits. First, make the toughest decisions first thing in the morning. Or, do the hardest task first. For example, if you find it difficult to complete your exercise after a long day working, then go ahead and get that workout done early in the day.

My second tip is to limit your choices and have a plan. If you have already done the leg work and only have a couple options, it will be much easier for you to have the discipline and make the decisions you want. For example, if you struggle with eating out spur of the moment rather than cooking at home, I recommend doing your meal planning for an entire week. Some of my clients like to do this meal planning/prep on Sundays. But pick what works best for you. Make your meal plan, go to the grocery and then clean and cut your veggies ahead of time. Simply knowing you have a couple of choices for dinner and knowing that all you have to do is throw them together, is going to help you stay disciplined and stick with your healthy eating plan rather than grab fast food on the way home.

3. Schedule it. I want to keep it really simple and remind you to schedule it. Most of us tend to live by our calendar, and scheduling in that thing we want to be consistent with is really going to help.

If you want to learn to drink water, set an appointment on your calendar to chime once every two hours telling you to go drink a cup of water.

If you want to make sure that you exercise once a week, three times a week or even every day, set aside time on your calendar for it.

By putting it on our calendar, we give it more importance than we would if we just think we are going to do it. It is like we are making it a priority and giving it equal value to meetings, client calls or even a hair appointment. It is something that we fully intend to do.

4. Avoid the “all or nothing” attitude. So many of us are stuck in this idea that we have to do it all and do it perfectly. If we can’t do that, then it’s nothing at all for us.

Here’s the thing though. Who is perfect? Who can do it all? The fact of the matter is that no one is perfect and no one can do it all.

If you approach your health under the tenet that it has to be all or nothing, then you aren’t going to get very far. In my own life as well as the lives of my clients I have found many more success stories by working on one new health habit, and by taking just one small step at a time.

It feels so good to give yourself permission to be the human that you are and start out small and win from that small step.

This is one of the many reasons that I recommend a five day cleanse. It is like taking one small step toward health that can have BIG positive results. My clients love the way they feel on the cleanse and are finding that it is easy to take some of those cleanse steps into their everyday life after the cleanse is over. They wouldn’t have learned those things if they hadn’t done the cleanse because it wasn’t for life (or even 30 days).

5. Get back on the wagon! Let’s face it; we are all going to fall off. No matter what level of commitment we have or even how strong our why is, we are human. Stuff happens. So, the likelihood of us falling off the wagon of our newest health kick is pretty high.

My best advice to you is to be kind to yourself, accept that you fell off, but get right back on again. It’s like learning to ride a bike! If you wrecked once and never got on again, you would never have learned to ride! Think of all the good things you would have missed out on if you never road a bike!

SOURCE: medium.com