Ian Ryves and Ian Spiby own Wellbeing Fitness, a health and fitness studio with main branches in Northamptonshire. They also own Wellbeing Fitness Education Centre where they run Level 3 Diploma courses for people who wish to qualify as personal trainers, sports masseurs and nutritional advisers. In addition, the Education Centre licenses these courses to over 50 gyms and fitness studios in the UK, Ireland and Europe.
This series of articles is about how to get people to take their health and fitness seriously. It’s no good trying to frighten them into it by giving warnings of how they are going to deteriorate as they get older. There has to be a change in the head. At Wellbeing Fitness, we have devised a Mindset course to help our clients to think differently which we are sharing with you.
So far, we’ve talked about setting goals and identifying a vision of how you want to be and what you want to achieve. We’ve tackled the question of the stumbling blocks that can prevent you from achieving your goals and visualising what you want to accomplish. In the last couple of sessions we talked about habits and their consequences.
Now it’s crunch time!!
COURSE LESSON 7. Make a real decision.
So – we’ve been talked about habits and over the past month you’ve spent some time (we hope!) noting down the consequences of them. In doing this you are building motivation to making the changes to your habits that will make a difference.
In the last lesson you decided on one habit that you were going to change to take you forward and one bad habit that you were going to break.
With habits, it is critical you take small steps to build momentum and to allow the brain time to adapt. The Japanese call this ‘kaizen’ (literally ‘improvement’) – making small adjustments to continually improve. That way, the levels of discomfort that the brain generates from the change will be less – making the change possible. So, rather than trying to make huge leaps, break your habits down into small parts and make a tiny change to either improve or break it. For example, if you have a habit of always wanting something sweet at the end of a meal, can you resist that temptation for just one meal in the day? Once you have made that small step, take the next, and the next and the next…
Task 1.
So, of all the habits you’ve listed, which one if you break it, will make the biggest difference to your ability to reach your goals. Write it down and then list the small steps that you are going to take to establish firmly that you will never do again. It will be a thing of the past – something you USED to do but which you do no longer.
Task 2.
Which NEW habit do you want to create that will propel you forward the furthest and fastest. Write it down! Now list the small steps that you are going to take to establish it firmly as your new habit that you never break.
We think you’ll be surprised just how quickly you can do these two things if you take those small steps
Looking forward to joining you for Course Lesson 8 next month
Ian and Ian