The One You Feed - How a Little Becomes a Lot: A Real Coaching Session on Small Changes That Stick

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

In this special episode, Eric coaches a listener named Birgit as she rebuilds her daily routine after a long-term illness and her children leaving home. Together, they explore practical strategies for habit formation, focusing on starting with a consistent healthy habits. Using frameworks like SPAR and RENEW, they discuss breaking habits into small steps, planning ahead, and responding compassionately to setbacks. The conversation highlights the importance of structure, self-kindness, and progress over perfection, offering listeners actionable advice for building sustainable routines during life transitions. Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Rebuilding life after a long-term illness and navigating changes in daily structure. Establishing a consistent morning routine, focusing on a healthy breakfast habit. The importance of specificity and simplicity in habit formation. Strategies for reducing decision fatigue and avoiding procrastination. The SPA framework: Specificity, Prompts, Alignment, and Resilience for habit building. The RENEW framework for resetting habits after setbacks: Recognize, Embrace your Why, Neutralize emotional drama, Extract the lesson, and Walk forward. The role of self-compassion and positive self-talk in maintaining habits. The significance of small, manageable actions to overcome resistance. The impact of environmental setup on habit formation and behavior. Emphasizing progress over perfection in the journey of habit change. For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this episode, check out these other episodes: Why Willpower Isn’t Enough: The Tiny Habits Method Explained with Dr. BJ Fogg How to Create Elastic Habits that Adapt to Your Day with Stephen Guise By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠Shopify⁠ – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. ⁠Pebl⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠hipebl.ai⁠ ⁠Brodo Broth⁠: Shop the best broth on the planet with Brodo.  Head to ⁠Brodo.com/TOYF⁠ for 20% off your first subscription order and use code TOYF for an additional $10 off. ⁠Alma⁠ is on a mission to simplify access to high-quality, affordable mental health care. Visit ⁠helloalma.com⁠ to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With specificity, what we're trying to do in the beginning is get rid of all ambiguity, all off-roads from the path you want to be on. Because the more that we have to think about what to do in the moment and then do it, the harder it becomes to do it. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Starting something new is always really difficult because we get caught up in the stories of what if it doesn't work out or what if I put time into this and it fails. And I felt all that when Chris and I started this podcast, but I'm so glad that I did start, that I started taking positive steps towards something that mattered. And so if you're thinking of building a business, Shopify makes that leap a lot less chaotic. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and about 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from brands you already know like all birds and hinds to people just getting started. You can use their templates to get a great looking store up fast. It has AI tools that can help

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that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Today's episode is a little different. I'm sharing a live coaching conversation with a listener named Birgit. Bergeet's in a season of rebuilding. She's been dealing with a long-term illness, her kids are grown, and she's trying to get some things back on track, eating well, exercising

regularly, doing more creative work. She's already made real progress, especially in how she talks to herself, but she's looking for help with the practical side, how to actually structure her days, so the things that matter to her don't keep sliding to the bottom of the list. Now, your life might look nothing like Bergheets, but the tools we walk through, how to build a habit, how to plan for the days when things go sideways, how to get back on track without beating yourself up,

these apply to pretty much any change you're trying to make. Along the way, I'll share some ideas from my book, How a Little becomes a lot that connect to what we're working on. Here's Bergheet. Good morning, Bergeet. How are you? Good morning. Wow. How about yourself? I'm doing very good. I'm excited to spend some time together and work together on a couple things. So to kick us off, why don't you just tell us a little bit about you and some of the situations in your life that you'd like to get some coaching on? So I've been an empty master for a while and also coming off of a long-term illness. So kind of have a lot of unscheduled time, you know, have the external. you know, job nine to five type of schedule. And my husband has a really varied work schedule as well.

And so that seems like I don't have a schedule, which actually isn't great. I've taken a couple classes with you, the Wise Habits class. And so that was probably looking back at like a year ago. And I feel like I've made a lot of progress. A lot of it being just how I talk to myself, just kind of, you know, maybe I have a bad day of not getting much done. And it's like, okay, well, that was that day. So moving on and not nearly as much negativity. Also, you know, making progress on a lot of self-care, making sure that exercise is a big part of my life. Some things get pushed aside, I think, having so much upstructure time, it's like you pay the bills, you take the taxes, because you have to and you've got that external deadline. But self-care and creative work,

a lot of times gets pushed aside. So maybe I do accomplish something with creative work, but it's more rushing and getting it done, which just doesn't feel as good as if you have that daily habit and make it accomplished easier. So just trying to build, I think a key habit in the mornings would be a really good beginning, and that would just help me make progress on prioritizing. Okay.

There's a Finnish proverb, I love. What you leave behind you, you will find in front of you. It means that the things that the thing, things we don't plan for don't just disappear, they show up later, dressed as obstacles. And I think that's part of what Brigitte is describing. The old structure, kids, schedules, the demands of illness, that was the plan, even if it wasn't one she always chose. Now it's gone and what's left behind is an open space that hasn't been filled with anything intentional yet. What's interesting to me is what she said about self-talk.

She's already made real progress there, learning to have a bad day and just let it be a bad day, instead of turning it into evidence that she's failing. That's a shift in how she relates to herself, and it's the kind of change that tends to be invisible until you notice it's been carrying you for a while. What you're describing is really common. I think people who do not have an external accountability schedule often find it challenging to get things done. And this can range from retired people. This can be people who are between jobs.

This can be people who are entrepreneurial and have their own thing they're trying to drive forward. But that lack of a structure or a schedule can become really problematic because when you can do something anytime, it becomes hard to ever pick a time. And so what I find with a lot of folks is we want to address putting in some degree of structure that fits your life. I often say structure liberates, but everybody's different in the kind of structure they need. So the key is defined for you, what's the right amount of structure that starts to steer your days in the way that you want them to go. And I also think with you, we want to be spending a little bit of time thinking about self-talk, how you talk to yourself, and then just also the feeling of overwhelm where you're trying

to do everything. You all of a sudden are like, you know, you've had an illness for a while. So there's a sense of, okay, I've got to take care of all of this stuff. And then that becomes overwhelming. And we don't want to do anything. Where I'd like to start is with this morning habit, that you think would help you kind of structure your day. What habit do you think would be good to put in as a place to begin? I think a really good habit that would affect a lot of things would be having a good, healthy for me breakfast. I want to pause here because Birgit just did something that's easy to miss. She didn't say, I need to overhaul my whole morning. She didn't say, I need to fix my diet and my exercise and my creative work all at once.

She picked one thing, breakfast. In the book, I talk about how we're always trying to balance two competing needs, choosing something easy enough that will actually do it and significant enough to matter. Most people err on the side of too much. They build the perfect morning routine on paper, and it lasts about four days. I'd much rather have someone succeed for a week and decide to do more than fail and give up. And that's exactly the instinct Bergeet is following here. That's a really good one.

It is a thing that ideally should happen most mornings. I have a process in the book called SPAR, and it's a way to structure our habit. When I think about building a new habit, a behavior, I think of it in two core components, and I'm hoping we'll get to both of these. The first is what I call structural. And this is what we're going to work through with SPAR. It basically means knowing what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, making it as easy as possible to do it. It's all sort of structural things that we can do.

And that takes us a long, long way. And then the second part is the internal, right? If we find ourselves knowing what we should do, being aware it's time to do it, but we choose to do something else, That's because we're thinking, feeling, or saying something to ourselves in that moment. We want to examine what that is. So you and I are going to start with the structural and spar is a way for doing that. And it stands for specificity, prompts, alignment, and resilience. So let's start with the specificity.

How can we get specific? Would you do it at the same time each day? Would you do it like after you get out of bed? Like, let's get specific about what time or timeframe we would be doing this. It would be at the same time every day. And I'm recognizing that for a long time, I haven't slept with an alarm, but I need to. I am getting enough sleep. That's not like that it would be a problem or it's unhealthy for me to do.

So, yeah, it would be at the same time every day. And I think the best thing would be to just have it be basically the same thing every day. So then I'm even probably getting faster as I go along with getting that prepared. One thing I want to add here, because it doesn't come up in the conversation directly. In the book, I make a distinction between two core competencies that we need in order to change behavior. The first is structural. That's what SPAR is about, knowing what you're doing, when you're doing it, making the path as clear as possible. but the second is internal.

And that's the part that kicks in when you've done all the planning. You know exactly what to do and you still don't do it. That's because something is happening in how we're thinking or feeling in that moment. And that's a different kind of problem that requires a different set of skills. We're going to focus mostly on the structural side today, but I want listeners to know, if you find yourself with a solid plan that you keep not following, it's because there's something happening inside of you at the moment that you make a decision, which I call a choice point that's worth paying attention to.

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of therapy, finding that therapy, and Alma can help with this. So find the right therapist for you at helloalma.com slash feed. That's hello alma, a-l-m-a-com slash feed. So let me ask you a question about that same time piece. You say that you think setting alarm would be good. What's the reason not to say you do it when you wake up versus enforcing another sort of thing into your schedule that maybe even another change to make, right? We're trying to change breakfast. Now we're also trying to get up to an alarm. We're starting to stack a couple things that we may or may not need to stack. I think that habit stacking is something that I learned from you is actually really helpful. And so I have a few things that I stack in the mornings. And those are the things.

things that I usually actually get done. You know, drink it water, take it medicine, stuff like that. So I think it will just actually give me a really good jump on the day. All right. We'll start with that. You'll set the alarm. What time will that be? Probably 6.30.

Wow, that's early. Goodness gracious. Okay. I mean, not for some people. For some people, that's late. You know, the Miracle morning crowd, the optimized morning routine crowd has been going since four. I get up at around noon.

I don't get up at noon either, as is typical of me. I'm sort of in between early and late. All right, so you're going to set the alarm. It's going to go off. And what's going to happen between the alarm going off and having breakfast? And the reason I'm asking this is with specificity, what we're trying to do in the beginning is get rid of all ambiguity, all like sort of off roads from the path you want to be on.

because the more that we have to think about what to do in the moment and then do it, the harder it becomes to do it. So what we want, particularly in the beginning, is getting rid of any not sure. So you wake up, then what happens? Walk me through what happens to get to breakfast. Okay. So wake up, take morning medication that I have to wait an hour to eat after. Okay. So make sure I get a decent amount of water.

Go back in the bedroom and do meditation for about 20 minutes. and it's sort of breakfast prep time. Okay. And is meditation currently a regular habit, or is that another one you're going to be trying to add? It's pretty regular. Okay, okay, great. All right. So you've kind of got that then breakfast prep. And you mentioned you're going to try and pick the same thing to eat each day so you don't have to kind of figure that out. I think that's a good place to start. I basically have the same thing for breakfast 95% of the days. The other questions I might be asking, but they're obvious in this case, but for people listening, they may not be obvious depending on what you're trying to do, which would be like, where are you doing it? How are you doing it? Well, and that's a question because then if it's ever a different schedule, it's like, okay, how do you make a plan for that? That's exactly right. The key idea, again, is just specificity in the beginning is our friend, ambiguity, is the enemy.

Let's walk on to the next part of SPAR, which is prompts. And this is basically what cue triggers this or what happens right before. There are different types of prompts. We could use a time-based prompt, a location-based prompt, for example, every time I go in the bathroom, preceding event prompt. And it sounds like that's the one you're going to use the preceding event. Meditation ends. I go to the kitchen. I start prepping.

prepping ends, I eat. So I think you've got the prompt kind of figured out in this case. The next part of SPAR is alignment, which is really about how can we set up our environment to support us. So are there any things that you could be doing to make it easier for you to do this thing each morning, you know, in your environment-wise? Yes. First of all, meal prepping so that like the protein's already ready. And then I think even just having everything for that breakfast in the same spot in the refrigerator every day. Okay. It's like I ran out of something.

Okay, I got to refill that for tomorrow. Excellent. Now, people listening may be thinking, this is ridiculous. Like, do we really need to put the stuff in the same spot in the fridge each day? And the answer is maybe. The example I always give is my guitar. If my guitar is on a stand, I play it something. like 70% more than if it's in the exact same spot in a case. When I think about that, I feel like,

what kind of weird animal are you that that extra 30 seconds to open the case, take the guitar out, deters you that often. It's bizarre that we are that way, but we are. And what we're after, if we're trying to make any positive change, is to stack the deck as much as possible so that when the moment comes, all we have to do is focus on just doing it with as little resistance as possible, and everything in the same spot in the fridge all ready to go lowers that resistance. I told the guitar story in that clip, so I won't repeat it, but I want to say something about why this stuff works because it's counterintuitive. We tend to think the thing that separates people who follow through

from people who didn't is willpower or discipline, some inner steel that the successful people have and the rest of us lack. But the research and my own experience says something different. BJ Fogg, who studies behavior at Stanford, boils it down to a simple model. Behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt come together at the same moment. And one of the really important things that we can control is ability, how easy or hard we make the thing. That's why putting the food in the same spot in the fridge matters. It's not silly.

It's one less micro-decision standing between Birgit and the thing she actually wants to do. And then finally, the last one is resilience, which is for us to think about, okay, what's going to go wrong here? What are the things that are going to get in our way? So as you anticipate the ways in which this may not work or days you may not do it, it. And you can look back on previous experience and go, oh, yeah, what are some of the things that might stop us? If I have like a doctor's appointment or if somebody else in my household, which now it's my husband, maybe he needs me to give him a ride or something so that it's happening earlier or it's not happening. And that's, I love what you were saying about putting it in the same spot because

when it doesn't happen, then it really does kind of mess up your day, especially if it's one of those keynote parts of your morning. Yeah, that's a great one. I think those are really, really common one. That's what happens to me with my morning routine is something else suddenly is in the spot that my morning routine would be. So there's a couple of approaches we can take with that. Approach one is that we say, well, today's a wash. The second approach we can do is come up with a plan for what we will do on those days. So the first one I think is one. I think is one. that is often worth doing. It's often worth just saying, you know what, today didn't work out because of X, Y, and Z. That's okay. Instead of feeling that, God, I screwed it up again. I didn't

do it right. We just write it off. Now, we don't want to get in the habit of writing it off, or we end up making excuses. So this isn't about making excuses, but it is about allowing reality to be reality. But let's talk about what you could do. Let's say you do have a doctor's appointment in the morning. What are your options if you want to try and keep this thing alive? I think just completely cooking it before and then just having it to warm up or have it be something cold that I can take with me. And so it's a lot of the night before. Yeah, that's a great one. I think a version of this would just be to say, I know what my on-the-go morning breakfast is. and it might be a healthy protein bar that you have a stack of in the cabinet.

It could be, as you said, something cold that you take, but it's knowing what that will be so you can just do it. That's one approach. So approach one we've talked about is you can just say, all right, you know what, doctor's appointment this morning, got to go take care of that, I'm going to let this go. Option two is we have a plan for what we do. An example I often give is back when I travel,

a lot for work. It was great at like exercise and meditation and all that when I was at home. But when I traveled, it would just get all messed up. And I finally realized that what I needed was a travel routine. One that it wasn't the same as at home. I didn't have as much time. I have this today. I have a mini version. If my morning gets away from me or my morning has to do something else, I have a mini version. And then the other thing that I think about a lot is a phrase that I use a lot. A little bit of something is better. than a lot of nothing. In your case, that doesn't quite make as much sense. But for me, with exercise, if I miss my morning exercise, I will often just look for where in the day can I move? Oh, I've got a 30

minute break there. I'm just going to take a walk for 30 minutes. What I'm doing is I'm honoring the underlying value, which is to move my body, to become healthier, to take care of myself. I'm honoring that. I'm just doing it in a slightly different way. So for you, You think it would be to kind of have a to-go option planned and ready? Yes, definitely, because my tendency has been to, like, just go get fast food or something. And, you know, for everybody, that's unhealthy. But for me, it's like there's a lot of things that you really shouldn't be eating. Yeah.

Does some of that relate to your health? Yeah. Your underlying illness that you're getting over? Yeah. Okay. So it's particularly important for you that that not be the way you operate. Yeah. Looping kind of all of.

way back to the top of this, one of the things we need to think about, and we won't cover it in this call, but I want you to be thinking about, and you can also do the spar method on this, too, if you want without getting too meta, but when are you getting the food that you need to have ready? There's a pre-step here, which assumes that the stuff is actually in the fridge and available and ready. And so that's something I would be thinking about also. And you can also think about what do I do if that pre-step hasn't happened? Because sooner or later, it won't. That's the thing about these sort of plans is that life intervenes in all kinds of weird ways. And we just want to be adaptable. But the ability to be adaptable is often to think about what will

happen. So you've got some things that sit in the pantry or in a cabinet that are your go-to when everything else has sort of fallen apart. For me, that ends up being a really high quality protein bar. I probably eat more of those than would be ideal, but there are a much better choice than either not eating or all the crap I could eat if I stopped at the local gas station. Exactly. So we've walked through this plan. This is good. Do you feel like you've got a pretty good picture on how to go about doing this? Yes. All right. I want to talk about creative work, because I think you and I in a previous conversation, you mentioned that you thought perhaps breakfast could act as a keystone habit of sorts,

that if you did that, you could start to build some of the other things you want to do on top of that. Talk to me about that. So, yeah, the creative work, one of the habits that I try to do and decent about doing it

is the artist's way by Judy Cameron, the horning pages of writing three pages by hand every day. And so after breakfast, I need to either do that or exercise. And I honestly think, It doesn't matter which, you know, it could be what I feel like doing today, not just based on circumstances, but have those both follow after. Okay.

I think flexibility is good. I would be careful, though, in the ambiguity there. Because if you end breakfast, you can get stuck in a loop that looks like this. Should I do morning pages? Yeah, I guess I could. But, you know, I probably should exercise also. Well, when did I last exercise? Well, and morning pages, and if I'm going to exercise, what might I do?

Right. All of a sudden, we get lost again. And those are all ways that we basically just bail out. Right. Yeah, I think actually it's more important to get the exercise in because I find, if I don't do it before noon, I don't do it. Okay. And so what I would say, or you can be like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or

morning pages, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, or exercises. It doesn't always have to be the same thing. what I'm trying to eliminate is you having to make a decision. And the principle I talk about is separating decision from action. Because when we have to decide and act in the same moment, it gets tough. So ideally we've decided ahead of time. The wisest, truest, smartest part of us has come up with a plan. And then all we need to do is have that other version of us, the one that shows up day to day,

the one that's tired or grumpy or whatever. It just says, I'm just going to follow the plan. So, okay, you're going to do that afterwards. I think that's a great plan. I might even break it down to what is the smallest action there. So, for example, exercise, I assume you know what exercise you're going to do. Yeah, usually it's just walking outdoors. Okay.

So for you, the next immediate step is put on your shoes, get out the door. You can just say I'm going to exercise. We don't always have to drill these things down to their smallest thing. but that's what we do when we're struggling. So I know for me, the Peloton bike is the thing. It's the goal. All right, I'm going to do 30-minute ride on my Peloton, or I'm going to do an hour to ride.

But what I often end up having to focus on is put on your bike shoes, because that's a small enough step that I can kind of get myself over the hump. I want to underline something that came up in this section because I think it's one of the most useful ideas in the whole book, and it's easy to skip past. separating decision from action. When we have to decide what to do and then do it in the same moment, we're asking a lot of ourselves.

The deciding part burns energy, and by the time we've decided, we've often talked ourselves out of it. So the goal is to make the decision ahead of time, when the wisest, calmest version of you is running the show. And then when the moment comes, the only job is to follow the plane. You can put all of your energy into simply doing the thing that is in front of you. I used to eat out all the time, but over the years I've done less of it because it's healthier and cheaper to eat at home. But the challenge, of course, is making that work during a busy week.

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for whatever reason. Is that where a lot of negativity comes in? Yes. Like even for example, we were talking about meditation, and there was a time when I, I had done meditation on Inset Timer every day for almost the year. Something happened, and every time I see that record, I'm like, oh, man. Mm-hmm. Okay. So I have a framework in the book I call the Renew Framework. It addresses exactly this thing, whether you're off track for a day, whether you get off

track for a week, a month. It's all about resetting. And that's the key, is that we are always going to get off track. And that's step one. R stands for Recognize. it's normal to get off track, to miss a day, to slide off for a week. It happens to everyone. So we want to recognize it's normal.

You know, for you it might be, okay, I didn't make breakfast this morning. That's just what happens. It happens some of the time. So we just normalize that fact. The second is we embrace our why. We kind of go back to like, well, what about this is important? because one of the things that sometimes happens if we slide away from doing something, it's because it may not be important or right for us anymore.

And it's always worth checking that. Why does this matter to me? And does it still matter to me? So embracing your why. So for you, what's the why here again for the breakfast? I feel so much better physically, emotionally, mentally, if I get that healthy for me breakfast. Okay. So there you have it.

you kind of have your why. So if you miss a couple days, you recognize it's normal, you embrace your why, why is this important to me? The next one, N, is a really, really important one. And I call it neutralize the emotional drama around it. What I mean by that is we start to tell ourselves stories when we miss. Let's say you're going along and you're eating breakfast really well and you miss three days for whatever reason. It's very common that our brain must, might start saying, see, I knew you couldn't stick with it. You never stick with anything. You're undisciplined. You're lazy. You're whatever awful ways you might talk to yourself. I actually had this come up with cooking breakfast. I was in the middle of doing it. And I was like,

why does it take so long to cook? And then I'm like, you're doing it. It's a few minutes away. Yes, yes, exactly. So we want to neutralize the emotional drama, which is usually, again, kind of going back to the R, we recognize it's normal. We're off track. And we want to stick with the fact. The fact is often like you were doing something for a while, then you didn't, and now you can do it again. That's the facts. Everything else other than that is interpretation. Oh, you're the kind of person who? Not necessarily. Oh, I'll never stick with anything. I'm lazy. Those are all interpretations that we're making off of the fact. And the fact is very straightforward. I was doing this thing. Now I'm not. I can do it again. And I even have that going back quite a few years where I had just built into my

day eating routine and an exercise routine. And I just naturally lost quite a bit of weight. You know, was feeling a lot healthier. And so looking at it now, coming off of some health issues, it's like, hey, it happened before. It can again. And even if it doesn't, I still feel better in all these different ways. So it's completely worth it to get back on that. that horse. Exactly. And I think one of the things that you've gotten a lot better about, and we've talked about this because you were part of the Wise Habits program, you're part of our community. So I've had some experience with you is you've gotten way better at how you talk to yourself. And you've gotten way kinder in yourself talk and way more accurate in yourself talk.

That's so amazing that it shows to somebody else actually really helps a lot and I'll remember it in the future. Yeah. Yep. And the reason that neutralizing the emotional draw, is so important is partially because it makes us feel better, but it's really critical to the next step, which is to extract the lesson. You know, what threw you off? This is curiosity, not blame. But when we are really revved up emotionally,

when we're really hard on ourselves and down on ourselves, we don't learn. Because to say to yourself, I'm lazy, or I'm the kind of person who doesn't stick with anything, you don't learn anything by saying that. What we want to learn is what happened, Why? Why were you going along? Fine, having breakfast every day, and now you haven't had it for the last three mornings. What's going on? I think you've talked about this a bit where we don't, for whatever

reason, have the emotional energy for whatever it is that are cats. You've talked about like when you're getting back to exercise, getting yourself to get those shoes on or what's tough. And so I think it's like you're tired in the morning and you don't think that you want to eat. even though you should. It's that exact thinking that's what I think is the derailment. Okay, good. So you have observed this pattern before and you have extracted the lesson. And the lesson to you is mornings where I am really low energetically are going to be hard.

So that's great. Now that we know that, we can plan that, right? So back up to our R step in SPAR resilience, we can think about, okay, what do you do on those mornings. I talk about this, and I'm vastly oversimplifying a bunch of complex neuroscience here, and I'm probably even not just simplifying. I'm probably messing it up.

But it's an analogy that works for me, and I think that our brains do something like this. It all happens subconsciously. But my example is I'm sitting on the couch, I'm scrolling substack, and I think to myself, it's time to get up an exercise. And my brain does this little calculation.

It goes, well, that exercise, that takes 10 units of energy. Eric, you've currently got one unit of energy. This isn't going to work. And I just keep scrolling. When I flip that to put on my bike shoes, my brain can run the same calculation. All right, I'm going to put on bike shoes.

That's one unit of energy. Oh, I have one unit of energy. Okay, I think we can do this. Oversimplification, but again, this is kind of what we're talking about with you. It's that ability to take what feels like too much, I've got to go in there and I got to prep and then I got to eat it and I really don't even feel like eating it. All that becomes overwhelming.

So we want to get to the very first step that you just push yourself to the first step, which is like, it might be for you, get in the kitchen. Or get in the kitchen, open the refrigerator, take the stuff out. And I often am negotiating with myself. I'm like, all right, just go put on the bike shoes. And then I say to myself, if you put them on and you still don't want to get on the bike, don't have to. I'll get on the bike and I'll be like if you still really don't want to ride after five minutes you don't have to. Now the good news is that once we get moving for me I almost always can

do it. There's a lot of like it's like a rocket right. It takes a ton of energy to get that thing out of the atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy or we face a lot of resistance to get started. But once we start, we often find, okay, motivation kind of comes along. So I think that is good. So you've embraced the lesson and we've been able to kind of go back and take that lesson and put it into your resilience planning. So this is perfect. This is exactly what I'm talking about. But again, if you were being hard on yourself, you wouldn't have been able to think, oh, well, it's really mornings where I'm emotionally or energetically low that this is happening. You just would have thought, I'm just, I'm not good at this. And then finally is W, walk forward. You know,

do something really small that moves you in the direction. of something that matters to you. So that's the renew framework. Recognize it's normal, embrace your why, neutralize the drama, extract the lesson, and walk forward. I like it. Okay, well, that's where we're going to wrap up. I again want to acknowledge your progress in both in how you talk to yourself, but also in learning to think about all these things and make forward progress. You're navigating a difficult situation coming off a chronic illness, difficult. Empty nesters, that's a real thing, you know, a husband with a work schedule that's flexible. You don't even have his schedule to be an anchor. You've mentioned he has ADHD.

There's a lot of challenges in the middle of all this. So I just want to make sure to acknowledge that I think you're doing a great job. And that's important for you to do also, is to focus on the successes you're having, not the times you don't do it. When you don't do it, use a renew, get back on track. but focus a lot on every time you do it, try and feel good inside. I did it. I did something that matters to me today. If you and I were doing this as a real coaching, we would have gone slower. I would have asked you more questions, but we went a little bit fast through this. But I think you have the core ideas. And thank you so much for being willing to come on, be honest and be vulnerable, because it's going to help a lot of people. So thank you so much.

Oh, thank you. What I notice about this conversation now, listening back, is that Birgit didn't need a completely new plan. She needed a little more specificity, a little more structure around what she was already trying to do, and some permission to be imperfect at it. I think that's true for most of us. We already know roughly what we want to be doing. We just haven't made it easy enough to do consistently. And when we fall off, we make it mean too much.

like it says something about who we are instead of just being a thing that happened. Bergeet said something near the end I keep coming back to. She talked about a time years ago when she'd built these routines and they were working, and then she said, it happened before, it can happen again. That's it. That's the whole thing, really. You did it before, you can do it again. And you don't have to do it perfectly to have it matter.

I'm grateful to Bergitte for being willing to share this, and I hope something in here was useful for you. Thank you for listening. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community. If you're listening

in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I'll be doing a live event at Garcia Street Books on April 19th at 4.30 p.m. Mountain Time, where I'll be in conversation with Henry Shookman, one of my favorite guests, a mentor and a Zen master. We'll talk about it. ideas from my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot. It's about what stands between us and our best intentions, between who we want to be and who we are, and what we can actually do about it. I'd really, really love to meet you there. I'll make time to connect with each of you that shows up. You can find the details and register at one you feed.net slash booktour.