“Take this pill and lose weight in 10 days!”
“5 Days to a Flat Belly!”
Heck, I even have a program called “5 Days to Food Freedom.”
Going big getting fast results is actually not a good thing!
When I walked into that 12-step program 7 years ago and became abstinent, immediately it was fun! For the first time in my adult life, people were rushing to me to know my secret and for me to be their sponsor.
The problem was that I didn’t know how I got abstinent – all I knew was that the alternative was despair so deep that ending my life seemed the only way out of my pain.
I know miracles happen and that I am so grateful for my miracle. Since that fateful day in February 2009, I have binged less than 4 times. I know this because I keep track on my “Don’t Break the Chain” app. It hurts those few times that I could not cross off that day of abstinence, yet my biggest growth has come from those days.
My biggest lesson that I must learn after every binge is that the present is a present. I only need to focus on being abstinent today. I only need to declare no to the lifesavers and pretzels today.
Going big and declaring that you will never ever indulge in that bad habit again almost guarantee you going head first into that destructive practice.
Instead, what you created a step so small that it seems stupid?
Steven Guise, wrote a book called Mini-Habits. I love everything about this book because:
- The man is so humble, every week is shares how he is working on saying hello to one woman a week.
- He stumbled upon a practice that actually creates big changes from stupidly small steps.
- I actually remember the content within its pages.
For example, I have used this stupidly small step to get back into blogging. For months, I didn’t write because I was so stuck in perfectionism. I had typos. My grammar can be immature. The whole process seemed way bigger than I could handle.
Taking Guise’s lead I committed to writing one sentence a day.
Yep, just one sentence.
The key to getting what you want isn’t about how big you step, rather it is all about how often you step.
I never wrote one sentence. Some days it was a paragraph while others days I wrote pages upon pages.
This masterpiece is my 6th piece in 2 days. Without the commitment to taking that stupidly small step of one sentence, I would still be laying around watching Army Wives on Netflix feeling crappy about myself – which may have even led to a binge!
Committing and consistently acting out that stupidly small step kicks your bad habit to the curb without it even knowing it!
Your subconscious runs 90% of your life and it also holds all your habits, patterns, and beliefs. It loves the way things are right now because it really doesn’t like to work that hard at changing. If you have ever said: “I know what to do (conscious mind that only runs 10% of your life) I just don’t do it.” You don’t do it because your subconscious sees this new desire as too much work, so you have to be sneaky
These stupidly small steps trick your subconscious into changing without even knowing it is changing. YAHOO!
Right now get out a piece of paper or a note on your smart phone and write down one of your desires.
Next, write down the repetitive action that will get you there.
Finally, chunk it down until the step seems stupidly small.
Do that step every day and track your progress then reward yourself every 21 days!
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