How do you do it?

Can you help me to be healthy too?

How do you have so much willpower?

These are the questions I’ve been asked over and over, before I was a coach, about how I manage to move my body every day, eat healthily, say no to the never-ending supply of office goodies or choose not to drink alcohol when I worked away in my corporate job. I was always questioned on how I managed to avoid the office canteen, opting instead to bring in my homemade breakfast and lunch. My colleagues were flummoxed at how I was always so prepared and motivated to eat something other than the popular canteen bacon sandwich.

These questions served me well. They were something that helped me to choose which path to take after being made redundant from my twenty-plus year corporate career. I always liked being asked these kinds of things, because I loved feeling I was helping someone else with the changes they wanted to make but were stuck with on their own. I enjoyed being a mentor on healthy living and building habits that worked. So, when I started to think about what skills and experience I had as I prepared to leave the corporate world, along with what I enjoyed doing and what people always came to me for my advice on, it was these questions and conversations that sprung to mind.

I don’t have any magic answers or radical insights to offer, to help people create their own healthy habits. I do however have many years of experience understanding how to build a healthy lifestyle and why it’s the power of the habits that can truly transform your life. It’s this knowledge and experience that have led me to help others through my coaching to build their own powerful habits. It was what I realised I was passionate about and wanted to help others to overcome their life challenges to live a happier life right now.

What most people don’t realise is that habits are running their life already. Every single day, a large proportion of what you think, feel and do comes from your habits. It’s the way we work as humans. Our brains want to conserve as much energy as possible for when we need it to fight off danger, to ensure our survival from the risks that might be put in our way. Habits form through repetition; from something your brain has responded to in a particular way that works for you. When your brain gets the reward it craves, it catalogues the action so it knows next time, when faced with the same problem, to respond with that file it’s stored away. Imagine it as a big metal filing cabinet with rows of drawers, each drawer stacked from front to back with those old fashioned cardboard hanging files. Your brain will open the right drawer, find the right file and pull it out, to put it into action to give the solution it knows is best.

That’s why so much of what we do in our lives comes through these cognitive scripts which are simply being followed automatically when the situation calls for them. These shortcuts can be the power to you living the way you want to, but they can also be the cause of you feeling out of control and stuck.

Without good habits, you aren’t going to be living the way you desire. Think about not having good healthy habits, you’re always going to feel lacking in energy and like you’re dragging yourself along each day. Without good financial habits, you’ll always be focused on where you’re getting your money from and worrying about how to balance your accounts. Bad habits can result in you always thinking about the future and missing out on fully living in the present.

The great news is that it is possible to break bad habits and build good ones. You can form new habits to help you change the way you feel, think and live. The starting point is to know what it is you want to change and then get clear on why this change matters to you so much. Simply saying you want to start going to the gym four times a week and setting out to make this a habit is very unlikely to stick. You’ll lose motivation, make excuses not to go, feel like it’s a constant slog and tell yourself the story that you’re better off as you are right now; you don’t need to change, it’s simply too hard.

If you want to take control of your life, you have to shift your habits!

**Watch Christy Baroni in her Tedx talk, sharing her insights on the power of habits for sustainable wellness.**

Christy is the owner and creator of Thirve Fitness and Nutrition and advocates the power of building the right daily habits for your health.

Starting the shift needs to happen slowly, with small steps, like planting a seed and patiently waiting for it to grow into the plant it will become. The biggest thing to know is that with both bad and good habits, the results are often not seen for some time. It’s the reason why bad habits stay put because you don’t realise the impact they’re having until it’s often too late - take smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not exercising or eating too much junk food. While you’re doing it, it’s easy to believe there aren’t any negative consequences. You can convince yourself it’s not that bad for you. But the long-term effects will take hold eventually, then it becomes a reactive necessity to stop the habit and make a change. It’s the same for many good habits, the real gains and difference is seen over time. To make a real difference, habits need to persist long enough for you to achieve the ripple effect of their benefits.

So, when you’re thinking about the changes you want to make and seeking out the quickest, easiest way to make it happen, remember that this might give some results in the short term, but the risk is you’ll slide back into your comfortable, already established bad habits pretty quickly. Then you’ll tell yourself changing is impossible, you’ve tried but it’s too hard and the effort is simply not worth it.

Instead, understand the power of habits and building habits for life. Why for life? Because a habit is only a habit whilst it’s being performed. As soon as you stop, it’s no longer a habit. That’s why I’ve built habits that are here to stay, and I know they’ll stay because I’ve built them to flow into my lifestyle; they’ve become who I am. The key to making this happen for you is to do the same. It’s to get clear on how you want to live and why this matters to you, to be committed to making your life the story you want to write. This way you’ll be motivated and driven to make it happen, to build habits that deliver the results you want.

WHY HABITS ARE YOUR SUPERPOWER

YOUR WELLNESS FRAMEWORK - Connecting the dots for health, wealth and happiness

IT ALL STARTS WITH A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP