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A while back, I had fallen out of going to the gym. And maybe that's happened to you too. You know, you get sick, you get injured, life gets busy, and suddenly, you know, a week or two turns into a few months. It happens, right? And so the whole time I'm thinking, I got to get back in the gym. But every time I think about it, I picture my full 45 minute to an hour workout. And honestly, that thought alone was followed with a bunch of excuses as to why I don't have the time. So I tricked myself. And this trick still works on me every single time I get out of the habit of going to the gym, I trick myself by saying, dave, just go to the gym, do one rep and leave. That's it. You have permission to just start there. And that little trick has taught me something really powerful about habits. And you can apply it in so many areas, not just to working out, but you can apply it to building a business, to designing the life you want. Anything. And that's what we're going to be talking about today in today's episode of Locally Owned. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Locally Owned. Today, we're going to be talking about habits, the hidden engine behind every goal that's achieved. One of the biggest mistakes people make when setting goals is believing that motivation is the key. It's not motivation, it can help get you started, but it's habits that determine whether you finish goals. They're exciting, they inspire us, they make us feel like we're moving towards something bigger, but they don't actually produce results. It's habits that produce results. If you want to get in shape, you might set a goal to lose 20 pounds, but the results come from the habit of showing up at the gym consistently. If you want to grow your business, the goal might be doubling revenue, but the result will come from the habit of prospecting, following up, improving systems, doing all the small little things that improve the business every single day. And this is something that I've seen over and over again with business owners. Most people focus on the big outcome they want, but the people who actually achieve outcomes are the ones who sit down and design their daily habits. They sit down and figure out what habits they need in order to achieve their goals. Habits are the hidden engine behind every successful business and every successful life. I mean, think about the difference between people who have good habits and people who have bad habits. So today I want to talk about how habits actually work and more importantly, how to design habits that make achieving your goals almost inevitable. So I want to start with something that sounds a little bit counterintuitive and it has to do with the opening. The best way to start a habit is to start ridiculously small. And I use this on myself a lot. We'll go back to the gym example that I opened up with. When we give ourselves permission to do just the smallest thing, what we're doing is we're creating a habit. If you know you want to get back to the gym and do a 45 minute workout, or you know you want to run five miles a day, well, you don't want to start there because you're going to burn out. But when you just pick the smallest thing, if you say, I'm just going to run 1/10 of a mile every day, creating the habit of running every day is more important than creating the habit of how far you're running every day. Because how far you run every day, you'll eventually get there. Right now you're just working on creating the habit, even though it sounds ridiculous, right? Here's how I used it in business, if I'm in a room of a thousand people and I say, who loves making cold calls? I don't think more than one or two hands are going to go up, right? Nobody really likes that. But for some of the work I do, I had to start making cold calls. And what I did was I said, I am going to make five cold calls a day. Now is that really going to drive my business anywhere? Not really. Five cold calls a day is, is nothing. Guys that sell for a living, they make 50 to 100. So I know that. But what's more important is me creating the habit of what people who are successful in my industry do. It will eventually get to the right amount of phone calls. I just need to create the habit. So now, once you understand that habits need to start small, the next thing to understand is how habits actually form in the first place. Most of our habits follow a predictable pattern. Something appears in our environment that triggers us. That trigger creates a craving. The craving leads to a response, and the response leads to some kind of reward. Let me give you a simple example. You're watching a movie, and in the movie somebody cracks open a cold beer and suddenly you think, man, a beer sounds good right? Now that cue seeing someone else drink a beer, made you want to drink one. So now you find yourself drinking a beer that just two minutes ago you weren't even thinking about. The cue triggered the craving, and the craving triggered the response. And the response now triggers a pattern. Maybe Your pattern is to then go out to a bar and meet up with some friends. Or maybe your pattern is to just have two or three more beers. Whatever it is, it all happens on a subconscious level. Let's recognize that this pattern happens and see if we can't use it to our advantage to to break a bad habit. So if you pause and really think about it, it's usually not the beer you want. What you're really wanting is that moment. So the character just got home from work. His dog sits on the couch with him. He hits the remote, the game comes on. He sits down, sends his girlfriend a sweet text. That's the moment you want, right? It's not the beer, it's, oh, I want to be that guy who comes home, cracks open a beer, watches the game and texts his girlfriend. The beer is just a symbol of that moment. But there's a cue. The movie cues this response in us to want a beer. So what you're really creating might be relaxation, or it might be connection, or it might be just the simplicity of that guy's life. Once you start noticing this, something interesting happens. You begin to realize that many of the things you think you want are actually symbols of something deeper. And when that awareness kicks in, you get a moment of choice. You can pause and ask yourself, okay, what am I really craving right now? Maybe it's peace, maybe it's connection, maybe it's just a break. And instead of automatically reaching for the beer, you can choose a different response. You can say, okay, maybe I'll say a quick prayer right now. Maybe I'll take a few deep breaths. Maybe I'm just going to step outside for a minute. Maybe I should text somebody that I really love and care about. And the reward ends up becoming instead of the beer, it ends up becoming this clarity and this self awareness instead of just a knee jerk response. Another powerful habit strategy is simply putting your habits on the calendar. I can't say how powerful this is. It's like writing out your schedule for the day. If you have a bunch of appointments, you're so much more likely to be prepared and to be effective and efficient in those appointments. And they're written into your calendar and you know when they're going to happen. It's the same thing with habits. So let's use this as an example. Let's say you want to write a book or learn piano or grow your business, but you never schedule time to actually work on those things. How's it going to get done? So here's a simple Rule give your habits a time and a place to live in the world. So instead of saying, I'm going to practice piano every day, say, I will practice piano every day at 7:30 in the living room every day for one hour. Now that's not an idea. Well, okay, let's get back to the smallest amount for one minute. Instead of an hour, it'll grow into an hour. So now it's not just this idea that you're going to practice every day. You've made an appointment, right? You put it on your schedule, you wrote it on your calendar. It moves from this intention that you have to an actual commitment that you've made. Another strategy that works incredibly well is what's called habit stacking. Habit stacking simply means attaching a new habit to something that you already do every day. So for example, I know I'm going to drink coffee every morning. That's going to happen no matter what, right? That's the first thing I do when I wake up. So what if I attach the habit of reading my Bible while I drink my coffee, right? And then stack on top of that, after I read my Bible, I will take my dog for a walk. When I get back from walking my dog, that's when I take my vitamins, make my pre workout drink. After I make my pre workout drink, that's when I go to the gym. You can just stack these habits one right on top of one another. Obviously you want to do them in a way that makes sense. But instead of creating habits out of thin air, you're connecting them to habits that already exist. And your day becomes this chain reaction. And if you don't do it intentionally, it sort of happens on its own, but it's not gonna be anywhere near as effective. Okay, so now let's talk about something that almost everybody underestimates, and that is your environment. Believe it or not, your environment affects your habits so much that it can actually change depending on the room you're in. I mean, think about that. We all know that we might behave a little differently depending on our surroundings. That's why one of the reasons that riders sometimes go to a cabin in the woods, it's not just the quiet, it's the change of environment. And that new environment breaks that pattern of cues that trigger distractions that exist in their normal space. But let's say you can't go to a cabin in the woods. You can still redesign your environment, move things around a little bit, Put the cue for a good habit right in front of you. Put the Cue for a bad habit. Out of sight. So just take notice of your environment. Take notice of the cues that are triggering distractions and get rid of them. Or just change your environment. Set up an office out in the garage for a little while. Do whatever you got to do to change your environment that's triggering cues that cause distractions for you. Now, another powerful idea is pairing something that you need to do with something that you want to do. For example, you only listen to your favorite podcast while running. You want to listen to your podcast, but instead of sitting there doing nothing, if you listen to it while you're running, you're pairing a good habit with another good habit. Or you can say, I'm only going to check the scores of last night's games after I make my sales calls. Or only eating dessert after you clean up the kitchen. It's the reward that pulls you towards the behavior that you're trying to create as a habit. Now, finally, one of the most powerful tools for building habits is tracking. There's this idea from W. Edwards Deming that says what gets measured gets improved. And W. Edwards Deming was ahead of his time. I can't even imagine what he would be able to do with the technology available today for tracking things. But he worked with auto manufacturers in Japan and in America to teach them how to improve their systems. And he said, the only way you're going to be able to improve your systems is by measuring them. In measuring them, it creates one of the most powerful motivators for us, and that's progress. Once we start seeing progress, staying motivated takes care of itself. It creates this feedback loop where your progress creates the motivation to keep going. That motivation to keep going furthers you down the road, so you're making better progress. And every time you look at it, by tracking it, you get motivated to keep going. In fact, I think there's really only three forms of motivation. Progress, pain and pleasure. Pain pushes us away from something. Pleasure pulls us towards something. But progress is unique. Progress is one thing that we get to design. When we see ourselves moving forward, even just a little bit, it makes us want to keep going. And here's the thing. Creating a habit is one of the most powerful things you can do. Now, habits alone are not enough. You can build habits, you can stack them, you can track them. But if those habits aren't connected to a larger vision of what you eventually want your life to be, they start to lose meaning. And when habits lose meaning, they lose momentum. So it's important to create a habit of looking at the larger picture. In my goal setting system, I created this tool called the Sharon template. And the Sharon template is a tool that connects your habits to your bigger vision. It forces you to actually get really clear about what you're building, who you're becoming, what success really looks like, what obstacles you're likely to face, what resources are already available to you. In other words, the Sharon template, it's going to create alignment so that your habits are aligned with your bigger goal. And Sharon is actually an acronym for Skills, Habits, Accountability, Resources, Obstacles, and Next Actions. So the habit part of that template is one part of a bigger whole that helps you think through exactly what you're going to need to do to move in a direction of becoming the person that you want to become. If you'd like to learn more about the Charon template and learn more and take it deeper on how to create habits that align with who you're trying to become, I want to help you with that. I've made it really easy for you. I created a course. It's a 12 module course and you can take the first three modules absolutely free. And from there, decide if this is for you or not. Just go to your goalmind.net that's your goal. It's a little play on words, but your goalmind.net all right, look forward to seeing you there and I hope you enjoyed this episode. Sam.