When was the last time you tried to create a new healthy habit – or perhaps wanted to break a less than healthy one? Either way, you may have found yourself stymied by a myriad of hiccups, setbacks, and downright failures; luckily, there’s good news! In her new book The Habit Revolution, Dr Gina Cleo reveals how it’s never too late to reprogram our habits to become our very best selves.
Falling down is normal, natural and to be expected. Hiccups don’t make you a failure; they make you human. The most successful people in the world have slip-ups and setbacks too. What makes them the most successful isn’t their ability to avoid setbacks, it’s their ability to persevere and get back on track. Changing your habits and reshaping parts of your daily life can be a process of two steps forward and one step back. The difference between success and going off course is if, when, and how you get back up again. Let’s have a look at five key bounce-back strategies to get you back on track after a setback: resilience, scheduling, consistency, self-efficacy and self-compassion.
1 Building resilience: strategies to overcome setbacks
Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties; it’s a level of toughness. Being a resilient person doesn’t mean you don’t experience stress, emotional upheaval and distress. Rather, resilience involves the ability to adapt to and recover from setbacks.
As you start developing your new habit, you may be doing great for a little while, then have a tough period at work, or become unwell, and forget about your habit for a period of time and go back to your old patterns. Then you pick yourself back up and return to your new habit, this time spending a little bit more time performing it. And this cycle continues, because life will always present numerous challenges. It may feel like you’re starting from scratch every time you drop your new habit and pick it up again, but actually you’re developing greater familiarity with your new habit, making it easier and easier the next time you do it. The more you perform a habit, the more automatic it becomes and the stronger your neural pathways become.
To practise resilience, don’t wait until tomorrow, or Monday, or next month to pick yourself back up after a setback. Pick yourself up as soon as possible, today, right now. Mindset matters because it shapes physiology. Just as the impact of stress will depend on the narrative you place around it, the way you view each setback is a choice – is it a failure or an opportunity to learn how to succeed?
2 Effective scheduling: staying on track with your habits
Some of us can be all-or-nothing thinkers. I was a chronic all-or-nothing thinker until I realised it wasn’t serving me. Here’s the logic that transformed me: it’s not the individual impact of a setback that holds you back from achieving your goals. It’s the cumulative impact of not getting back on track and not doing so quickly.
When I started powerlifting, my coach gave me a training schedule that included a morning gym session three days a week. I trained for a few weeks before getting a really bad head cold. I felt rubbish and knew my body needed rest, but I didn’t want to lose my momentum of going to the gym in the mornings because this habit was still in the early development stages, and I knew that getting back into the rhythm would take a bit of effort. So I let my morning alarm go off at the time it usually would for training, I got dressed in my active wear, I got in the car, and I drove down to the gym, runny nose and all. I didn’t get out of the car; after parking, I drove straight home and got back into bed. I couldn’t powerlift but I could continue the schedule of getting ready and going to the gym. Once I felt better, the habit of getting to the gym was easy because I’d been reinforcing it by going each morning.
This bounce-back strategy is all about finding ways to stick to your schedule, no matter how small the action is. When you can’t perform a full habit as planned, do the minimum you can do to stay on schedule. This will help you bounce back quicker than you would believe.
3 Consistency matters: achieving lasting change
Consistency is by far the most important strategy for achieving long-term change. Just stick at it. Do what you can, as often as you can. Keep doing it until it eventually feels like second nature. Keep going and go some more. Change the goalposts, make your micro habits even more micro if that’s what you need to do. But instigating the habit and being consistent with it is what’s going to build the neural pathways in your brain for your new habit. Consistency, not intensity, is what will get you across the success line. So just keep on keeping on.
4 Boosting self-efficacy: confidence in habit formation
Self-efficacy is confidence and assurance in your own personal ability; it’s absolutely believing that you can and will achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself. Having self-belief also gives you the freedom to make mistakes and allows you to cope with setbacks by seeing them for what they are – temporary hurdles.
Every single day, focus on your goals, rewrite them and re-read them. In great detail, visualise yourself achieving them. Read empowering affirmations that are filled with positive messages that destroy limiting beliefs and build empowering beliefs. With time and consistency, your brain will start to rewire any old self-limiting beliefs and your new empowered beliefs will be your new normal. We become what we believe we can become.
If you believe in your ability to achieve a goal, your brain will support this belief by highlighting all the reasons why you can and will succeed. This then motivates you to take steps that lead to that success. Consistent thoughts turn into beliefs, which lead to actions, which result in outcomes. With persistence and practice, we can develop a more positive mindset and focus our attention on the reasons why we do indeed have the ability to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.
5 Practicing self-compassion: kindness in pursuit of goals
The final setback strategy and one of my absolute favourites is self-compassion. Self-compassion is giving yourself the same kindness, gentleness and care you would give a friend. The biggest and most successful transformations come from a place of self-love and self-compassion, not self-loathing.
Self-compassion is about recognising in ourselves that we are human, that we are naturally imperfect, and that we are all in this together. We all fall, we all stumble, we all want to do better and be better. Self-compassion includes empathy, kindness, forgiveness, caring, tenderness and various other synonyms for acceptance and non-judgement. You don’t have to achieve all your goals overnight. And you don’t have to feel ashamed for being where you are now. All you have to focus on is one small thing you can do today that will get you closer to where you want to be. Slowly and gently, one step at a time, you can and will get there.
6 Striving for momentum: embracing progress over perfection
Try your best to let go of all-or-nothing thinking. Accepting you’ll probably slip up a few times when trying to break a habit and coming up with a plan is one thing. Preventing feelings of frustration and failure when you do slip up is another. Slowly and gently, one step at a time, you can and will get there. If you fall back into an old habit, you might wonder, ‘Can I really do this?’ You might begin to doubt yourself and feel inclined to give up. I want to encourage you to look at your successes instead. Aim for momentum in a particular direction rather than perfection. Instead of focusing on your end goal and where you are in relation to that goal, remember that anything you do that’s more of what you want is fantastic.
Want to know more? Pick up a copy of The Habit Revolution by Dr Gina Cleo. Published by Murdoch Books, it is available where all good books are sold. RRP AUD$34.99
Ready to get started building habits? Get your copy of Mindful Planner here (pictured above).
This article was originally published under the title The Habit Revolution in Issue 35 – Embrace Your Vulnerable . You can purchase previous issues and enjoy more enchanting content here
