The One You Feed - Mini Episode- Small Changes

Episode Date: March 23, 2015

Getting unstuck, small changes add up over time, a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing and the power of keystone habits. Visit our website for more informationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey everybody it's Eric from the one you feed with this week's mini episode.

Another brief reminder, if you're interested in doing some one-on-one work with me, send me an email to eric at oneyoufeed.net. And what I want to talk about today is some of what I've been doing in the one-on-one work I've been doing with people. I seem to come across these same things over and over again with a lot of different people. But I want to talk about the idea of habits. I want to talk about breaking these habits down into really small steps. And I want to talk about the idea of a keystone habit. So for most of us, there's something that we want to accomplish in life. We maybe want to get in better shape. We want to write a book. We want to learn to play guitar. We want to start our own business. Whatever those things are, we want to get in better shape. We want to write a book. We want to learn to play guitar. We want to start our own business. Whatever those things are, we want to take up a meditation practice.

And usually there is a big space between where we are and where we would like to be. And part of the problem that I see a lot of us run into is we try and get from A all the way to Z without going through B, C, you know your alphabet. What I work on a lot with a lot of the people that I've been working with, and frankly, in my own life, is breaking things down into really small habits. So we've talked in the past about find something, take whatever the piece of work you have in front of you and break it down to the smallest possible increment you can and work on it. And so a lot of times I've been working with some people who are like, who we talk about exercising for

two minutes or five minutes a day. And what happens is they, they get started and then their brain tells them that there's no point that two minutes a day or five minutes a day doesn't matter. And then they get stopped. They don't do it. And the thing that's important to understand there is that in the grand scheme of things, no, two minutes of exercise is not going to make you an incredibly healthy person. But that's not the important thing right now. The important thing is to build the muscle of doing something on a consistent and regular basis and build the muscle of doing the things that we say we're going to do. Because for a lot of us, we are very much in the habit of making promises to ourselves, talking about what we're going to do, and then

starting it and quitting very quickly or never getting started. And so we, I think over time, we tend to build up a, we don't really trust ourselves. We, it's pretty easy for us just to go, oh, I started that. It's something else. I quit. I hear a lot of people like, oh, I'm just not the kind of person that finishes things or I'm not a motivated person. And I think that those things are not inbuilt. So being a motivated person or a person that doesn't finish things is not a personality

trait. I think it's something that's been learned. If we think about the idea we've talked about on the show before between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, you know, the fixed mindset says, I'm just not a motivated person. The growth mindset says, well, I could be motivated if I work at it. And I think that for most of us, if we look, we can find some time in our life where we were motivated or we finished something. And so we want to build from those things. The idea of a keystone habit is that if you can make a change in a habit, a small habit and make it stick, it becomes sort of the, the, the keystone that lets you know that you can do that with bigger things. And our interview with Tony Stubblebine, he talked about a guy who quit smoking

using the Lyft application or the coach.me application. And when he was talking to Tony later, he was like, well, I learned to do it with smoking. And so now I'm traveling the world and I'm learning other languages. And the smoking was just the first step. He learned that he was able to make a decision, take action on it and see it through. Once he was able to do that in one area of his life, he was able to expand it out to the other areas of his life. So that's why often I will encourage us to do things that seem stupid small, but to get in the habit of doing it every day, begin to build that muscle, and we start to have trust in ourselves, and we can build from there. So if there's something that you're wanting

to change, and you're finding it hard, if you've been saying you're going to take up a meditation practice and you don't do it, you keep finding that you start, you're going to meditate every day for 20 minutes and you do it one day, then you do it, you forget for a few days, then you do it another day. I would really encourage you to look at meditating for three minutes a day or five minutes a day, but become really committed to getting it done every single day. The thing that you will also find though as you work on this is that you may not do it every single day at first. And so the other inclination we have to watch out for is the all or nothing or the screw it syndrome

which is I didn't meditate today so forget it and you just quit entirely versus going all right I missed yesterday I'm back on today. As James Clear said, never miss twice. So to sum up, if you're having trouble making some of these behavioral changes or working with your habits, the first thing to remember is that's not who you are. You are not a person who is inherently bad at those things. You may just not have much success with it so far. You may not have the proper tools, the proper resources, or the proper approach. So that's thing one.

You can change. Secondly is break it down again as small as you can. It is far better to start really, really small than it is to start larger and fail. So you're much better off with doing it consistently in very small doses. You can build from that. And that idea of a keystone habit or momentum that allows you to take those small changes and turn them into bigger changes over time.

If you need any additional accountability or support or help with these things, send an email to eric at oneufeed.net and we can talk about some of the one-on-one work that i'm doing thanks for listening new episode out tuesday we'll talk again soon all right bye Thank you.