if you want better habits, please listen to this

Summary

at 26 I was broke and busy. now I run multiple seven-figure businesses and coach thousands of entrepreneurs. the difference between those two versions of me is not talent, it’s habits. here’s the six-step framework I use to build them.

1. start small. smaller than feels meaningful. if it feels embarrassingly small, you’ve sized it right. people fail because they go too big on day one and quit by day four.

2. one habit at a time. don’t try to install five habits in a quarter. one. until it runs on autopilot. that can take up to 100 days.

3. front-load the day. put the new habit early. willpower drains, decision fatigue compounds, the day’s noise gets louder. early wins are the only ones that consistently happen.

4. hire a coach or get an accountability partner. outsource the part of yourself that wants to quit. someone you don’t want to disappoint is more powerful than any motivation hack.

5. commit to 100 reps. not 100 days. 100 reps. if you miss a day, the count doesn’t reset on the calendar, but it does on the rep count. you owe the system 100 actual completions.

6. expect to fail and just restart. failure is part of habit building, not the opposite of it. the people who win restart faster than the people who don’t.

Transcript

why most people can’t stick to habits

If you want better habits, but you can’t seem to stick to them, this episode is for you. So if you flash back to when I was 26 years old, I was broke and busy. I was hustling and I barely knew what a habit was. I would have told you at the time that I totally knew what a habit was, but I didn’t really know how to form a habit and how it actually worked.

Now you fast forward to today and I’ve helped thousands of entrepreneurs build habits. I have multiple seven figure businesses. We’ve hit the Inc 500 two different times and in the strength and conditioning world, I’ve coached over 20,000 people online and it all comes back to habits, how you build habits.

step 1 , go small (seriously small)

So I’m going to go over the six step framework I have for building habits. I’ve refined this over the years and use this with a lot of people. So let’s jump right into it. The first thing you need to do is go small. This is where everyone screws it up. You are not going small enough when you are creating your habits.

It’s just like strength, training, fitness, anything in that realm. If you decide you want to go back squat 500 pounds and you’re like, okay, well, then all I need to do is go load the bar to 500 pounds and squat it. But it doesn’t actually work that way. Does it? You can’t squat that much weight. So you need to train. You need to go smaller. You need to lift the bar.

Then you need to lift one 35 to 25. You have to work your way up to be able to achieve such a feat. And it’s no different in our habits. You want this. I’m going to go train exercise seven days a week, or I’m going to create this habit or system in my business. But in reality you haven’t done anything like that in the past.

So why do you think that you can just jump to this big massive habit when you don’t actually have that capability? And I purposefully want to challenge you here. Are you even capable of the habit you want to achieve? If not, and most of the time the answer is you are not capable. You need to go smaller, go incredibly small. So going back to the back squat example, just cause it’s an easy fitness example. If I want to squat 500 pounds, what do I need to get in the habit of doing?

Probably squatting multiple times per week. So the only habit there is not some linear progression program. The actual habit is just getting in the gym two to three days per week and squatting. We can worry about the weight. We can worry about the programming. We’re worried about everything else later.

step 2 , never more than one habit at a time

So any habit you were trying to build, you need to go small as small as possible. All right. Number two, never more than one habit at a time. That is how habit building works. You build one habit. You focus on that for as long as you need to before it actually becomes a habit. So if that’s six weeks, six months, a year, whatever it takes, however long until that is an actual habit, you don’t have to think about anymore. It’s a routine.

It’s something you’re going to execute every single day. You don’t move on. You don’t go build a new one. You don’t have it stack. You don’t do anything until that one is actually a habit and what people want to do. You know, we talk about this. Oh, well it takes three weeks to build a habit, which is complete BS. It doesn’t take three weeks to have, make a habit.

It’s more like 60 to 70 days. If you’re lucky, it’s really a hundred days is what I push most people to do. Do something for a hundred days and I’ll talk more about that in the next phase here, but you need to just do one at a time in a year. You might only be able to accomplish three habits, but if there are three life changing habits that are going to stick around for the next decade, that’s huge. So again, like going small, only one at a time, then you can do the next one and you slowly start to build this until you transform who you are one habit at a time.

Never more than one habit at a time. The third tip I have here is more in the tactical nature and it’s front loading the habit. You need to front load your habits. So if you want anything in this life, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning, right? It’s just the part of first part of your day and it can be anything.

step 3 , front load your habits

I could give a couple of examples. If you want to drink more water, try to get 30 40 50% of your water consumption in the first few hours of the morning. If you want more protein in your diet, try to get 30 40 50% of the protein you need up front. If you’re trying to get more steps in a day, try to go run one, two miles in the morning, whatever it is to front load that habit because backloading almost never works.

That’s where the procrastinator lives, right? It’s like, Oh, I want to get 15,000 steps a day and then you’re like at the end of the day, 8pm you’re at 7,000 steps. Now you’re walking around the block like an idiot because you just didn’t front load it. So front load it. So the rest of your day is a lot easier.

And it’s a lot easier to get things done in the morning when you don’t have as many things pulling you in all these different directions. So we don’t care what the habit is.

If you can front load as much of it as you possibly can at the beginning of the day, or if it’s just a task, that’s a single thing that needs to get done, get it done first thing in the morning, front load it so you don’t have to worry about catching up at the end of the day.

Because even if you’re able to stick to that procrastination habit, which is where I didn’t do it all day and now I’m going to do it later in the day, you’re really just building the procrastination habit.

And that’s not the habit you want because how many more times can you do that? If we get through a hundred day cycle and it’s good, but really you’re just stressing and burning out and doing it at the end of your day, you’re not really building up a good habit. You’re just doing the grit and willpower thing at the each at the end of every single day. And that’s not what we’re trying to build.

step 4 , hire help or create real accountability

Now building grit and willpower is a good thing, but that’s not what we want to have to utilize every time we are going to make a new habit. We want it to become automatic. That’s the goal. So front load things and that becomes way easier and way more possible. Number four is hire help, hire a coach, hire somebody who can hold you accountable.

That is typically the first thing I do anytime I am going down into a new endeavor. Like when I first started shooting video content, I hired a coach for that because I knew that they were going to ask me every single week what I’ve done, what I’ve recorded. I didn’t want to be the guy who came and didn’t have an answer to that question.

Accountability is huge. It’s how humans work. It’s how we operate. So if you can hire a coach to hold you accountable to different things and Hey, maybe if you don’t have the cash to hire somebody, do you have a friend who won’t take your BS and will actually try and hold you accountable? Check in with you. Typically I’ve seen those things fizzle up, fizzle out like pretty fast.

So the best thing you can do is hire a coach, someone who can hold you accountable to getting the things done that you need to get done. And you don’t have to do this step. It’s really, if you’re struggling, if you feel like I just can’t do this, I’m not doing it the right way. I’m not sticking to a habit, but you absolutely want this habit in your life.

Hire a coach, especially in the fitness nutrition side, hire a coach. Don’t run from your coach when they’re trying to hold you accountable. That’s what a lot of people do. They stop listening to the check-ins. They don’t want to go to the meeting. They cancel the subscription. Just stick to it. Pay them no matter what, until you start to make this habit automatic. All right, number five, I’ve mentioned it several times, but you need to do it a hundred times.

step 5 , do it 100 times (no exceptions)

Look, if you read the book, The One Thing, it talks about a lot of the psychology and research on building a habit. And that during this, there was this really big study, people landed on it needing to be three weeks, but that wasn’t the real answer. That was what the average came out to be. When you look at like the median, it was more like 66 days is what the map came out to be.

And what I found and actually tracking these things, when I want a new habit, I track it. I use like a habit tracker. I’ll see. I have found that it takes most of the time, even more than 66 days for it to truly become automatic. And I’m not just like talking about a streak that you can maintain. I’m talking about to where it becomes a habit. I wake up in the morning, I drink my water. I do whatever the habit is. I drink the water.

I do all of those things. It takes a long time. And what I found is the magic number that’s worked with everyone. I’ve pretty much ever worked with on the fitness side, on the business side, a hundred times, a hundred times in a row. And if you fail, you start back over. You don’t get to move on until you’ve done it 100 times.

Once you’ve done it a hundred, a hundred times, you can then move on. But that is what I recommend for most people. It’s ruthless. It’s hard. You will fail. You will fail over and over and over again, but you will keep starting at day one until you get a hundred. And I guarantee if you can take that mentality, I’m going to do this.

No matter what, till I get it a hundred times, you will start to build that habit. It will become automatic. You’ll be able to stack another one in the next hundred days, and you will then start to transform who you are. But until you can take that mindset, you’re not going to make any progress. You’re just going to be the person who wants a habit, but never actually gets the habit. All right. Number six, you will fail. You will fail more than once.

You will fail two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times. When you were trying to build a habit, you will fail over and over and over again. It’s just what is going to happen. And it took me forever to realize that you just need to try again. Now I know that whole adage is super cliche, dust yourself off and try again.

But here’s the deal. Most people, after they fail a few times, they start to abandon it and they think that they’re not that type of person. They can’t be that person. They’re just other people who have these good habits. I’m not like them. They’re amazing. I’m not amazing. That is not the case and I’m not trying to be raw, raw motivational for you.

step 6 , you will fail (here’s what to do next)

I’m letting you know that every successful person I’ve ever met myself included, we fail a shit ton when we are trying to build a new habit, a new system, a new framework. But the difference is not that just we try again, we know that it’s part of the process. So we don’t beat ourselves up. We don’t have the internal self talk where we’re saying we’re not that type of person. We just keep after it.

You just need to keep going and know, Hey, I want to create this new habit. I want to work out six days a week. That’s the new habit. I’m only doing two days a week right now. And then you do six days a week and you do that for six weeks and it’s somehow it’s not a habit and it falls off and you’re back down to two, three days a week.

You fail. You just need to start over. Just start over back to the six days a week. It will eventually become a habit. It will eventually get there, but you have to know that failure is a part of the process for every single person who’s ever tried to build a habit ever. It’s incredibly hard. It’s one of the hardest things humans can do.

But like I’ve been saying this entire time, if you can build habits slowly, maybe one to three new impactful habits per year and they stick in a few years, you will be a completely different person. You’ll be the person that you want to be, but it takes a lot of effort and you can’t stack 57 habits this year.

It’s one, maybe two, maybe three. Implement all of these steps and you will be closer to getting the habits you want and becoming who you want to be.