#12 What to Do When Your Habits + Routines Aren't Working

Transcript:

Robyn: We've all been there. You set a goal or you decide to focus on a new healthy or happy habit. You're excited. You have the fresh start effect on your side and you can't wait to get started. And then the days go by and the weeks go by, and you begin to wonder, am I seeing progress? Is this working? And then from there, you start the spiral downward into, "This isn't working. This is not worth the effort. I don't know why I'm bothering. Maybe I'll just give up." And yes, there are a number of things that can cause the spiral. But there's one in particular that I really want to offer you today, one that maybe you haven't thought about or one that you can bring to the forefront so that you can create habits and routines with ease, but also feel that you are being successful.

Hi, I'm Robyn Conley Downs. I'm a health and happiness habits expert, and this is Whole Life Organized. By the end of this episode, you'll have one really effective strategy to troubleshoot those times when you feel like it's just not working. So if you're new here, or if you've been with me for a long time, I will tell you that I have a framework that is based on the research and the science of creating happy, healthy routines and habits. And it starts with asking how you want to feel and setting goals and knowing why it matters. And it gets into the function of what needs to happen, asking the 80/20 question of what do I need to do more of and what do I need to do less of based on what's working and what's not. From there, we find the brilliantly basic things and then figure out how to fit them in, put them into the schedule to snack it or to break our day up into smaller parts so that these things actually happen. And last step, we focus by making it easy, creating a system and creating momentum so that we can be sustainable and make this change last. And there is a key part to this, to creating feel-good routines and habits that fit in your life, that help you reach your goals, that really are supportive of who you are and where you want to be. And I see over and over that this key part either gets missed or gets misconstrued, like misunderstood, and that thing is keeping us often from feeling successful, but also from feeling like something's not working and then giving up or quitting before giving it a chance to really work to make the impact we wanted it to make.

So to explain this, I'll take you back to when I was a social science researcher using the scientific method to run experiments. And if you haven't used the scientific method since who knows, middle school, I'll remind you that you start with a question and then you get a research topic area and then you come up with a hypothesis. So what I think is going to happen and from your hypothesis, you put together an experiment. In the simplest terms, I was thinking back to my daughter's second-grade science experiment for the science fair, which sadly ended up being scheduled for March 13, 2020, which was the first day of lockdown, at least in Oregon where we live. So she never got to present her beautiful second-grade science bear poster. It sat in our house. No joke. For two years, that giant cardboard trifle board in our dining room. I don't know, we thought maybe someday she would be able to present it. And by the time she eventually went back to school in person, the moment had passed. But either way, she designed her little experiment using a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, basic second-grade version of the scientific method. And so here is what she was, the question she posed and her hypothesis. At the time, my husband was really into making kombucha at home. Yes, that's a thing, made kombucha in our house. And if you're familiar with kombucha making, it uses something called a scoby, which is sort of like almost like the mother for sourdough. So the scoby is what creates those bubbles in the kombucha and also flavor if you've ever had kombucha. It's the same idea as any kind of fermented thing like beer, again bread, it's the same concept. And the scoby feeds off of sugar. You actually have to feed it sugar and we use like a basic cane sugar to feed. So, what did she think was going to work best? And here is where we actually come to the point that I want you to think about. Because in the case of Elle's little experiment, she needed to know or wanted to know what was going to work best. What is the most successful way to grow a scoby? And here's the thing that is actually so important. She needed to define what she meant by best. So, how would she... she know which scoby was performing the best against the others? And this, my friends, is a step that we so often skip because she could have defined success or best here by how tall a scoby grew or how wide it grew or the color or did it make the fizziest or tastiest kombucha? There were so many ways that she could measure success. Now again, she was in second grade, so she chose the easiest thing to measure, and also the most obvious in her mind. So she chose height, like how tall it actually grew with the different sweeteners. And then from there, she came up with her prediction, which sweetener did she think, and then she ran the experiments, and then she analyzed the data and wrote up her little conclusions. But as you can tell, she could have chosen a different result or version of success, and it would have very much changed the outcome of which one she thought was best at the end.

This is so important because it is how we define success and how we are measuring success that is telling us whether we think something is working or not. And the thing is, you have a lot of options in terms of how you want to measure and define success. Now true, some of those are going to be way easier to measure. Like the amount of water I drink in ounces per day, pretty easy to measure. I mean, it's maybe a little tedious, but I can measure that pretty easily. So I could say success is drinking 100 ounces of water a day, and I can pretty easily know if I'm being successful or not or if it's working or not. I can make a goal of 12,000 steps a day and again, pretty easy to track. We actually have fitness trackers on many of our wrists that could tell us right away if we hit the goal or not, if we were successful or not. But when it comes to real life and these more complex goals that we have, well, measuring success becomes more important, but it also becomes trickier.

But let me tell you, if you don't have a good grasp on this, it's really hard to know if something is "working" and even more difficult to know if it's not working. So now let me give you a really, really specific example of what this looks like in real life. And this is based on a combination of a number of different clients that I've worked with. So this is not one person in particular, it's probably a common of five people, but the common problem is shared between all of them. So let's say this person comes to me and she knows that she wants to feel energized and strong and fit. But when we get into next steps like 80/20 and Brilliant at the basics, things start to unravel a little bit. And she comes to me and says, "This is not working." And she wants to know, "Do I just seem to be patient or should I just abandon this effort?" Because you know what? I really feel like it's not working. So then, of course, I say, "Rewind, tell me more. What do you mean it's not working? How are you measuring success?" And when we get into the nitty-gritty, the answer is I'm defining success by how my body looks, and maybe the number on this case as well.

Now, my point here isn't that you can't or shouldn't use those as measures of success. My point is just to make sure that you are being intentional about how you're measuring. Because it's also really hard to troubleshoot if your goals and how you're measuring don't match or they're not intentional. Because if your goal is to lose fat on your body, then you would measure success by action, measuring fat loss, which doesn't always reflect on a regular scale. But let's say you have the special scale that actually measures fat loss versus just overall loss, like which includes muscle and water retention and all those things. Let's say you have the special scale that can tell you exactly if you've been losing fat off your body and then that loss stalled out for several weeks or even months, then you would know. It was what you were doing, wasn't working, and you could go back to the habits and to the routines and say, "What am I doing or not doing that's contributing to how I'm measuring success?" Now, of course, I'm not trying to trigger anyone by talking about fat loss, but honestly, I have people that come to me that have a overall goal in how they want to feel. But as part of that, they have goals related to, I think, what they really have the goal around is body composition and changing their body composition.

But it's one of the more clear and relevant examples I can give about why having a clear measure of success is so important. So here's what I would do with that client. Number one, I would go back to how do you want to feel? And remember, how you want to feel is like a vision of your life and overall outcome. It's not really a goal because how you feel isn't something you can just achieve, check off, and move on. Our feelings fluctuate. It's not an outcome necessarily. It's the vision. It's like painting the watercolor of your life as how do you want to be in this area of your life? Do you want this area to feel expansive in your life? Do you want it to feel full of ease? Do you want to feel connected? It is a general sense of being or a general vision. But from there, and this is why our field get effect coaches are so great to work with, because it's about really getting clear on that goal. And from there, how you're measuring success so that you can look at the 80/20 and know what's working, what's not working, what to do more, what to do less. So that's how I would troubleshoot right off the bat. I'd look at how you wanna feel in the specific area of life and make sure that you know how you wanna feel isn't like an outcome goal that you're measuring, it's a vision of what you're working toward. And that from there, you've set some specific goals that can be measured and that you know what successful looks like. And then I get so, so clear with you on whether you're setting a process goal or an outcome goal. And I write a lot about this in my book, "The Feel Good Effect." But the difference between a process and an outcome goal is an outcome goal is something you reach at the end. So for example, an outcome goal would be, I want to run a marathon. So you've only... achieved that goal. Your only measure of success is the day that you run the marathon. And think about this. If you train for a marathon for 100 days and you run the marathon on the 100th day, you have spent 99 days technically failing because if your measure of success was running a marathon, you spent 99 days not running it and then one day running it. So 99 out of 100 days you're not accomplishing the thing. One day out of 100 you accomplished it or you didn't. Now a process goal would be an actual number of miles per week perhaps that you wanted to run that progressively increases toward that 21 mile at a time goal. And if you broke that down and then training. training program each week, the first week you might be running a total of seven miles, then you met the goal. You did it. Success was being measured by a total number of miles that week. You would know it was working because you either ran the seven miles or you didn't run the seven miles. If it wasn't working, you'd be able to troubleshoot pretty well. I don't know if seven miles is the first week of training for you for a marathon is the right number. Doesn't matter. It's just an example. But if you only got three miles, then it would be pretty easy to troubleshoot, right? Because you would know, you know what? I didn't get seven in because I was too tired. That was too high of a number for my first week or I didn't get seven in because I got injured or I didn't get seven in because I didn't schedule it right. You can troubleshoot and fix things, right? like in real-time when you set a process goal. And you don't get stuck in this mentality of it's not working because you actually have something to go right back to to fix or to troubleshoot. And a process goal around body recomposition is going to be very specific about the habits, the daily and likely habits that you need to adopt to change body composition to gain muscle and lose fat. And again, here you have to just be really clear on how you're measuring success, that I have set this goal, a body recomposition. And in that case, I'm measuring success by muscle gained, which you do need kind of a special scale to check at a specific level, and by fat lost. And instead of an outcome goal, which again, you can have outcome goals, like I want to... lose this much fat and I want to gain this much muscle, you would focus more on the daily and weekly habits that you would need to have to change body composition. So you would set habits around strength training and likely some kind of progressive overload. And you'd set habits around some kind of calorie deficit for fat loss. And then, you know, again, how you're measuring success. So if you're checking muscle and fat and it's not changing over time, you go back to your habits and look at how are my habits interacting with the goal I have. And again, I apologize if any kind of body recomb discussion is triggering, but I think it's the best example because honestly, it is one of the number one reasons when people come to me and they say like, I have this general... goal of how I want to feel. And then they kind of skirt around what they actually want. And I'm always like, let's just talk about what it is that you really want here. What is the actual goal? Be honest about it. And then what needs to happen? What's the 80/20? How are we measuring success? And then what is the process? What are the daily habits look like? Once we know those things, then it's so easy to know if it's quote unquote not working, or to know, hey, you know what? You do just need to be patient. Some things just take time, and we have to allow it to work and ourselves to work in order to see the payoff that we're looking for. I recorded an episode last week if you caught the episode on Big Goals on Echolera. a goal around Instagram growth, which again, I don't expect to be totally relevant in your life, but I thought was just a really tactical, tangible example of all of this stuff in action. And the big outcome goal that I set was 25,000 followers. But what was more important is the process goals that I set, those daily habits, so that I can measure, say, and I can know if something is working or not working. Because at the end of the day, I have absolutely no control about followers on a social media. I do have control about the habits and the work that I put in. And especially when you're playing the long game, when you're working towards something big and audacious and likely far off in the future, it's so beneficial to set these up-based goals. So for example, in the Instagram example, I said, "I'll post to the grid three times per week."

So it's very clear how I'm measuring success here. I post three times or I don't post three times. And I'm giving myself a couple of months for that to be the only outcome so that I can get in the habit of creating and the habit of posting and the habit of improving, the habit of looking at and saying, "What worked here? What didn't? How can I improve?" Because it would be so tempting to just say, "You know what? This isn't working. I'm not at 25,000 followers, so it's not working. I'm not doing this anymore." But I redefined success and I focus on the process, so then I don't have to ask the question, "Is it working?" And this really does go hand in hand with 80/20. It's really hard to ask the question, "What's working?" and "What's not working?" if you don't know what you mean by working, right? And the beauty of this is that you get to decide. I'm measuring success right now when it comes to movement or exercise using an outcome of progressing in weights. So right now I'm using six pounds in a class that I do on a regular basis. And my goal is to get up to eight pounds. And so I will know if it's working, if I can graduate to eight pounds. And if I can't, then I can ask, what do I need to do differently with my strength in order to see some muscle gain so I can go up in weights? I also measure success when it comes to movement by asking, did I honor what I needed today? And that one's much harder for me than progressing in weights. So that means asking before I go into a class or before I start moving in any way, what do I need? And maybe it's a low-energy day. I've mentioned before I have chronic health conditions. Sometimes I just have such a low-energy day that I need to push back. I need to take it easy and I need to just show up, you know, or push play and do the best I can. On the flip side, sometimes what I need is to actually push a little bit. I found in the last couple of months that I'm ready for a little more of a push, for a little more challenge. Like I'm working up to those eight-pound weights, so I'm gonna do a couple more reps with the six pounds. I think we get confused sometimes that gentle means easy and that's not always the case. Gentle just means listening to yourself, asking what do I need right now and then honoring that. So far. I end my workout knowing that I honored what I needed, that's success. That's working for me. Another way I'm measuring success with movement is consistency. And again, you get to define what consistency means also. So for me, the process goal is to show up five out of seven days for some kind of movement, some kind of exercise. And then I'm measuring success with was able to do five out of seven days. And then if I'm not, if it's not working, if I'm not hitting that goal, that process, goal, those habits that I'm trying to develop, I can actually troubleshoot, right? I can say maybe that five out of seven was unrealistic. Maybe my energy's not there for that number. It was overly optimistic, or maybe I need to do some changes with my schedule so that it's possible. I need to move the time around or I need to schedule it ahead or I need to work with Andrew to make sure that that's happening for me. I have a lot more ownership over it and I have a lot more agency control of tweaking and adjusting and making it work. So back to the little second-grade scoby experiment. If Elle had asked or if Elle had defined success as how wide it went or the color it turned, she would have gotten really different results. Like one would have won out over the other, which is why it really, really matters that you know how you're defining success and that you remember that you get to decide that. And that if you're starting with how you want to feel that you know that that's the overall vision that you're honest with yourself about what you really want, that you get super clear on whether you're setting a process or an outcome goal, and if you're just setting outcome goals that you have to wait to achieve for a really long time, I invite you to indulge in the beauty of a process goal because it's habits-focused. It's how you're actually spending your life, it's how you're actually spending your days, and then to revisit how you're defining success so that you don't spend time feeling like something's not working. And then from there, there actually are times when you just have to be patient. Success and change do not always come overnight and growth can take time but knowing where you are and exactly where you want to go and exactly how to get there changes everything. I would love to know more about your thoughts related to process and how goals and measuring success. You can connect with me at Whole Life Organized on Instagram or at realfoodwholelife.com or Instagram for healthy, simple recipes. You know, I still haven't figured out a sign-off. If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears. But for now, I'm going to go with here's to healthy, healthy simply.