I’m not going to talk about SMART goal setting or the usual “new year, new me” bullshit. Like you, I have seen it every year for a long time. In fact, 2020 marks my 22nd year in the fitness industry. Personally I am not one for New Year’s resolutions. I do believe the end of the year and start of another is a great time for reflection, introspection and time to plan for a better future, but I also believe any time is a great time for doing self-reflection and the like. It doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the year.

If we look at most people’s resolutions they revolve around getting healthier or fitter, earning more money, having a better social life, better relationships and so on. In order to have any of these things we have to change our behavior; and in order to do that, we inevitably have to make an internal shift.

Personally I am a very goal orientated person, but goal setting, just like resolutions, has been pushed down our throats for over 20 years by self-help and fitness industries alike. If resolutions worked for everybody we would see people realize their goals every year. The truth is that some goals simply don’t work.

The power of our thoughts and the quality of them will lead our decisions, habits, and behavior. This will ultimately lead to us achieving (or not achieving) our resolutions in 2020. So, here are some points to consider when setting your resolutions for 2020.

Connect With Your Internal View of Yourself

Call it storytelling, internal dialogue, self-talk or the unconscious dialogue that goes on in your head (whether you are aware of it or not). The things you say to yourself about yourself has a massive influence on your behavior.

Most of our decision-making is based on self-stories. You unconsciously make decisions that match your idea of who you are and your identity. When you make a decision or act in a way that fits your self-story, the decision or action will feel right.

In contrast, when you make a decision or act in a way that doesn’t fit your self-story you feel uncomfortable. If you want to change your behavior and make the change stick, then you need to first change the underlying narrative that is operating.

If you want to be healthy, then you have to have an operating story you tell yourself that you are a healthy or healthier person.

As author Stephen R. Covey said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

When we think a thought, it elicits an emotion. We often deal with any uncomfortable feelings with addiction or unhealthy obsession—using food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, drugs, gambling, religion, even sex and exercise to help us feel better.

Initially, these things can make us feel better, but in the long term overuse of these things is often unhealthy. Relying on comfort food, for example, doesn’t help us work on the root cause of our emotions.

In an emotional eating cycle, we eat “bad” food, then often judge ourselves harshly. Next, we feel guilty and shameful for eating said “bad” food and for falling off the wagon with our diet.

Finally, we have catastrophic thinking where we self-sabotage and create more self-loathing and, as a result, self-medicate with more “bad” food. Rinse and repeat. These thoughts, the emotions, and behaviors that follow hurt us.

If your self-story is one of self-flagellation and self-loathing then you are operating from a place that will never help your resolutions of being healthier become a reality. Self-soothing with forgiveness, acceptance, and self-love can be a powerful antidote to this destructive cycle of shame.

Understanding this process and acknowledging the root problem can be the first step in breaking the unconscious circuit of unhealthy habits. Understanding your emotions will be the number one thing to work on if your resolutions in 2020 are to become a reality.

Don’t Make Your Resolutions Out of Obligation

Your why for your resolutions is crucial to your success in achieving them. I believe doing things for others can be a very strong extrinsic motivator—getting fitter so you can run around with your kids, honoring a passed or living family member or looking good for the opposite sex.

Yet, time and time again I find that when the going really gets tough when plateaus are reached when there are setbacks and failures, those who are doing things for reasons outside of themselves are often the first to quit.

Instead, when you have a big internal and intrinsic why and when you are doing things that align with your purpose and your highest values, you will find you have a bigger yes burning inside of you. This will allow you to say no to all other things that get in the way and will help you overcome obstacles in your way.

Operating from a place of purpose and values trumps motivation anytime. Motivation comes and goes. The driving force that is left behind will help set up the habits and discipline required to soldier on. We can waffle on about discipline as much as we want, but habits are underpinned with a deep drive that comes from an internal shift.

Have you ever thought about what would make you happy? What do you want? Many of the resolutions we set are not necessarily what we genuinely want. Have you ever filtered out what everybody else thinks, what everybody else wants and ignored everybody else’s judgment and criticism?

So much of the time we are worrying about what other people think of us to gain validation, external gratification, and acceptance—the very things that we have forgotten to give to ourselves. We often make our resolutions due to obligation rather than a genuine burning desire and passion to make them happen for ourselves.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature”

– Marcus Aurelius

Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient (EQ), is one of the things I wish I had learned about at school and wrapped my head around at a much earlier age. How we feel about things determines, for the most part, the choices we make and our behavior.

Regardless of whether it is becoming more financially literate, getting healthier and fitter, or being better at relationships, all of these resolutions require one thing: you must work through any preconceived ideas, beliefs or thoughts that are not working for you or are harmful.

If you continue to bring along your baggage, the thoughts and beliefs that are not working for you currently (whether you are consciously aware of them or not), you will continue to have the same results.

Sometimes EQ can come in the form of taking control of our environment so it leads us closer to our resolutions. What we know from research is that your environment and the systems you have in place are far more important than willpower and grit.

We forget that often our environment creates and controls us, not the other way around. A classic example of this is avoiding certain people or coping with the saboteurs and hecklers on your health and fitness journey.

This group can include friends, family members or even partners. It is navigating the rough sea of sensations, emotions, people or locations that trigger poor choices.

It can be impatience with your results, trying to be perfect, testing yourself too early with particular food situations or being overconfident and thinking that you don’t have any more to learn, only to not have a strategy for difficult situations or a contingency plan for a bad day.

Maybe you are too proud to ask for a hand on your journey to keep you accountable or to track your progress—two of the main reasons why most resolutions fail.

It might also be how you view setbacks and failures. If we look at our success and failures in the same way, as a victory in feedback, all of a sudden our perspective on things and our self-story can change.

All successes are just a string of failures. And, in fact, our failures give us the opportunity to simply tweak what it is we are doing in order to learn. If more people viewed setbacks in this way, we would see a lot more people sticking with their resolutions.

Maybe it’s being self-aware of procrastination, the little voice inside the head that is scared of the resolution, maybe it’s saying we aren’t good enough.

Maybe your goals are too big and unrealistic and you underestimate the difficulty of changing what is normal for you. Sometimes we forget action begets more action and if we don’t change something in our daily routine, no matter how small, nothing else changes.

EQ also comes in the form of falling in love with the journey, the habits, and the process. It is easy to fall in love with the destination, the results, and the outcome. But falling in love with the habits required to get there is far more important, otherwise, we will simply never get there.

The realization of goals does not change a person. Instead, the thinking that changes along the journey and the internal shift to realizing a goal, is what ultimately changes a person, not the destination. Placing value on what is learned along the way rather than the goal itself is emotionally intelligent.

Change the Way You Think in 2020

There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be better off financially, wanting to be ripped, to have better sex and relationships, or whatever your resolution is. They are, however, resolutions that lie outside of ourselves.

Maybe this year it is time for a different approach if you have been unsuccessful in the past. There is no doubt these things will improve our lives, but often we think that these external things will bring us happiness.

In fact, however, the quality of our thinking will dictate how we behave, influence the decisions and choices we make, and determine how happy we actually are. When the quality of our thinking is better, we naturally gravitate toward the things that are better for us.

Just remember that changing the way you think is just as important, if not more important, than trying to change what you do.

The post Nothing Will Change This Year If You Don’t appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

At the beginning of each year, I am super busy with writing personalized plans for people who want to start the year off fresh with goals they want to achieve. They are feeling excited and positive for the changes ahead.

It is wonderful that we all have dreams, goals, and visions that give us a true sense of purpose in life, but often progress slows or stops completely as the year goes on and these goals aren’t met.

Basing goals around things like New Year’s resolutions often end up being nothing more than a wish or a fantasy. The intention is there—that burning desire and sense of optimism to look better, to feel better, to learn more, save money, become more zen, or whatever the goal is.

This is why so many gym memberships are sold and self-help books are bought near the end of each year. So, why do so many of us start off goals with vigor but then drop off like flies as the year goes on?

1. Lack of Preparation – For us to meet our goals, we need a well thought out plan that is broken down into achievable steps.
2. Lack of Application – In order for these steps to be carried out on a long term basis, they must be integrated into our lifestyle.

The Power of Your Daily Choices

Focusing on the small steps that need to be taken on a consistent basis is the key to success. In a nutshell, it is the small decisions made daily that have an accumulative and profound effect on our lives over time. Being aware of the steps we need to take (the planning part) and proactively making the choice to act on that plan (the application part) will bring us closer to our goals.

The only way to real and long-lasting success is to integrate these planned out steps into our lives and make it part of our lifestyle.

We look at people who have “made it”–the people who are millionaires, multiple-time world champions, totally zen and at peace, or have the perfect body, relationship, or whatever it may be. It is easy to misconstrue that this happened overnight or that they are genetic freaks or they just “got lucky.”

But more than likely, these people spent years working hard to achieve these levels of awesomeness. Each day these hard-working, driven people get up an hour earlier to go to the gym, or each day they allocate quality time with their children or spouse.

They also make the time for some mindful meditation. That is why they have succeeded. They are aware of the steps that need to be taken to reach their goals and they active make choices day in, day out to bring them closer to those goals.

Regardless of what our goals are, whether it is to be a multi millionaire or just to be healthy and feel good again, hitting those goals all follows the same basic principles, planning, and application. Here are some step by step strategies to help you get there.

Strategies to Meet Your Goals

What is it that you want?

Work backward and lay out your long-term goals. Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in one year?

• Break down your one-year goal plan into months. By breaking down your goals, it becomes easier to see the smaller actions that need to be taken to achieve bigger goals. This makes things not so overwhelming and therefore more achievable.
• Break down your goals week by week. For example, if your goal is to lose twenty pounds, then your week by week strategy may be to lose one or two pounds a week.
• Break down your goals to day-by-day. This is actually where it all happens and where this concept comes into play through you actively making choices and decisions on a daily basis. If your goal is to lose twenty pounds, then are you going to opt for mac and cheese for dinner or fish and salad? If you choose the fish and salad every day, then you most likely will achieve your weekly goal of losing one or pounds, right?
• Grab a diary or journal. Write it all down and have something available to refer back to and to track.
• Put reminder and motivational notes around your house or workplace where you can see them all the time. A student of mine sent me a photo that she has on her desk. This is a great motivational tool!

Let’s use weight loss as our example for this strategy and for example, your goal for 2019 is to lose 20 pounds and to feel great.

• By breaking your goal down into months means that you aim to lose 8 pounds every month.
• By breaking your goal down into weeks means that you aim to lose 2 pounds every week. You aim to visit the gym 3 times per week, meditate once a week, have a massage once a week and walk with friends once a week and limit yourself to only one dinner out a week.
• By breaking your goals down day-by-day means that you make the decision to go to the gym or go for a walk that day or to skip that ice cream and opt for frozen banana slices instead.
• By writing these activities/actions down in your diary first and then checking it off at the end of the day is a great way of keeping you focused.

Everyone can achieve their dreams with focused intention on a daily basis.

Awareness and Application

Having awareness of the choices we make is super important which is why planning and knowing exactly what steps to take or what choices to make is essential. Now that we know what our goals are and all the steps to get there, we can create a lifestyle that makes these small daily choices easier.

As previously mentioned, it is the small decisions made daily that have an accumulative and profound effect over time. If weight loss is your goal, then arrange a day to go brisk walking with your girlfriends and stick to it every week.

If these steps aren’t part of our lives then the decisions to bring us closer to our goals may be harder or difficult to remember. It is important to note that the small decisions made daily that we don’t make also have an effect.

These, in fact, will take us further away from our goals whether we realize it or not. Because you didn’t set a day once a week to go walking with your friends and make it part of your life, you only ended up walking about ⅓ of the time throughout the year.

Take Consistent Steps

I believe all our dreams can come to fruition if we actively make it happen through conscious choices that bring us closer to our goals at every moment. Don’t let your excitement about setting a goal wear off.

Plan everything out and break your goals down week by week to small achievable steps that you can carry out daily. Create a lifestyle that makes it easier to apply these steps and make your choices easier.

The idea that our small, daily choices matter (and can add up to so much) is so simple yet such an amazing formula to attain the life you want. If it’s all about making small choices, then every one of us has the power to enact profound change and accomplish incredible things.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Meeting Your Goals appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

My days are packed starting at 3:30am—that beautiful, silent time of day when the world is still and I think clearest. By 6 am, I’m wrapping up my writing and commencing the daily schedule. I love the order, efficiency, and freedom I get from having a plan.

Chaos and deviation are near certain, but the plan orients my vision so I am always able to adjust best. The day ends and I’m able to boot down knowing I have my objectives ready for the next day. I go home and am free to do as I like. Yet even with this freedom, I’ve noticed some odd patterns.

The Beauty of Habit

When I get in the door, I always put my bag up and place my laptop on the charger. When I kiss my son goodnight, I always say the same thing. Night-night, Ace. I love you very, very much. And, every night before bed, I walk over to the sink and brush my teeth.

These actions aren’t on the schedule. Come to think of it, neither was my 6:30 am workout, the oatmeal breakfast, or my lunch salad, yet I seem to duplicate these actions almost every work day.

This is the beauty of habit. There are things I need to do, but would rather not have to invest mental calories planning and executing each day. There was a time when I had to intentionally create the change out of clothes—brush teeth—go to bed habit loop. However, now I fight plaque and gingivitis every day without thought.

Habits—a cue, routine, and reward—infuse nearly every action in our life. Someone cuts you off in traffic triggering the anger protocol. You call them a low down dirty scoundrel—or worse. The smell of fresh cookies hits your nostrils and you commence gorging on them as if a judge is timing you for the Guinness Book of World Records.

There are good habit loops that take care of an immediate need: I finish dinner, collect plates, and promptly do the dishes.

And then there are profound habits, like what author of Habit, Charles Duhigg, called keystone habits. These are things that change your trajectory and positively amplify every other pursuit in your life. Exercise, for example, is consistently shown to lead to greater work productivity, mood, creativity, better nutritional choices, a more active day, and everything short of an ability to fly.

The Downfall of Habits

Unfortunately, driven by the age of mass-marketing, most of our societal norms promote less constructive habits. I feel sad and bored. I’ll check Amazon. Buying this will make me happy.

You see, there are also bad habit loops: You see a bite-size Twix on the table at a work meeting and then you eat that bite-size Twix. Or, that annoying leash you call an Apple-watch, buzzes on your arm and you look away from the dinner conversation to see what message has come in—a work email that dominates your focus the rest of the evening.

At Inspired Human Development, we focus on promoting inspired living by challenging the standard model of life:

“The standard model is life as we know it. It is the promise of happiness and fulfillment if you only just follow the expected and “normal” path through Western life.”

Societal habits are the hardest to fight. The normal path indoctrinates youth in habits that almost certainly will plague them with poor mental, physical, and emotional health. A 2016 Harvard study predicted that of youth between ages 2 and 19, over 57% will be obese by the time they are 35. This is certainly the current trajectory. In 1970, one in twenty youth were obese, but today that has grown to one in five. Anxiety, depression, suicide rates, and drug-overdoses have seen a similar climb.

The best thing we can do for our kids (and ourselves) is to personally demonstrate a better model. Your personal habits bleed out into your life and shape the institutional habits of your family structure. There is no greater call to get your own affairs in order than the understanding that your actions and attitudes will become your children’s. Strong parents. Strong kids.

Inspiration follows action, it will never consistently precede. Sure, everyone gets excited about the diet or workout that they are sure will turn them into Tony Robbins, but few follow through with their ambitious goals.

Consistent action only happens with habits. Therefore, we’ve found that the best place to start helping people create amazing lives is to help them create powerful habits. The IHD Core Habits are the daily actions that most amplify the joy, possibility, and engagement you feel in each experience and create the most powerful ripple effect into every pursuit.

They change the way you perceive, think, and act. Rather than focus on changing a billion small actions, prioritizing these three habits will permeate the rest of your actions.

Core Habit #1 – Daily Movement Practice

If you’re physically healthy and exercise regularly, that’s about 50% of the picture. There is a rare Winston Churchill exception to this rule, but almost universally happy, successful, fulfilled people are healthy.

They have a movement practice that has prompted them to develop a better understanding of their nutrition and rejuvenates their mental and physical vigor. This is the foundation their life is built upon.

Our psychology follows our physiology. The mental is first understood in terms of the physical. If it’s done right, physical exercise becomes a form of mental exercise. It’s a microcosm of all life, predicating the willpower and delayed gratification that underlies all success. At its most basic level, it models the necessity for action to stoke inspiration and change.

Core Habit #2 – Meditation with Gratitude

The human brain is always scanning the Savannah for threats—for what is wrong. Anyone who was inclined to assume every rustling bush would be harmless was eliminated from the gene pool a long time ago. Thus, we’re hardwired to see the negative. Yet, research overwhelmingly indicates negative people are less healthy, less adaptable, and more likely to miss opportunities.

Your operating system was not intended for the modern environment. It has bugs that require you to update. Practicing gratitude rewires your brain to perceive possibility and appreciate the abundant amazing world we all enjoy.

Meditation is the essential antidote to 21st-century overstimulation. Despite its frou-frou stigmas, it is the toughest mental training program I know, offering focus and an awareness of current thought patterns.

From awareness, we learn that our thoughts are not us and, therefore, don’t have to control us. We have the ability to see new perspectives and act with greater emotional control.

Core Habit #3: Feed the Right Wolf

We are assaulted with over 10,000 advertisements a day and the momentum of an entire society hell-bent on consumption, convenience, and comfort. You can only white-knuckle your rebellion from the normal for so long. Systematizing pulls toward your goals may be the most important step in staying on track and making the road to progress a fascinating, inspiring, adventure.

For more information on how to feed the right wolf and a deep-dive into all these habits, I strongly recommend IHD’s free e-book: The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery.

Justin Lind and I have created a clear plan of attack to help you understand the principles behind sustainable action. From there, we prompt you to apply these principles into a 3-week Self-Mastery Training Plan. We’ve included workouts, challenges, gratitude reflections, and clear direction for how to optimize your environment and embed these transformative habits in your routine.

The majority of people wish for change. Few have taken the steps to master themselves. In this guide, we give you the tools to create lasting, adaptable changes that permeate every area of your life.

This Week’s Mission

Download the Essential Guide to Self-Mastery and begin the Self-Mastery Training Plan. What could be more important than mastering yourself so that you can become the person you want to be? Life is too short to be normal.

The post 3 Core Habits that Amplify Life appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

No, it isn’t.

Wait, what? Stop exercising? Isn’t exercising good for you? Aren’t millions upon millions of people looking for the right reason to start exercising? Besides, isn’t it my job and duty as a fitness professional and writer to convince you of the merits and copious benefits of exercise?

No, it isn’t.

It’s my job to promote and support the intended purpose of fitness—functionality and wellness. Furthermore “selling” fitness is played out and isn’t working. Despite the noble intentions of many that join a gym, the majority drop out and the fitness industry has made little impact on the obesity pandemic and epidemic of sedentary lifestyles. Why?

Don’t Use Exercise as a Crutch

The reason may be that many have been duped into pursuing the wrong motives for exercising. Some people use fitness as a short-term crutch in an attempt to solve a problem that requires more than an exercise plan.

Take a quick glance around many gyms and you’ll see the proof that many patrons seem to be there for every purpose but functionality and wellness. Instead they pursue vanity, weight loss, and narcissism, to name a few.

Of course, there are indeed plenty of valid reasons to start (and keep) exercising. Chief among them are to get better at something, get healthier, and use your body more effectively (getting stronger, faster, or more flexible).

Exercising is also a great way to compliment almost any physical activity. If you’re a golfer or a downhill skier, you’re very likely going to be a better one if you participate in a regular fitness routine.

Exercising also helps you mitigate stress, stave off sickness, and even develop mental acuity. But you likely already knew that, and as the title of this piece states, this isn’t an article touting the benefits of exercise.

This is an article about the reasons not to exercise and believe it or not, there are some legitimate reasons you should hang up the gym shoes.

Why You Should Stop Exercising

You don’t like it. There are a lot of things we have to do that we don’t like—going to work, flossing our teeth, paying taxes. Isn’t exercising like that? No, it isn’t. Exercising is something you do with your leisure time much like going to church.

You’re there to participate in making yourself a wholly better individual and that means being a respectful “parishioner” in every meaning of the word—to others, to the environment, and of paramount importance, to yourself.

Look, not everyone likes exercise and I’m not here to convince you that you should either. If you can’t abide at the gym by participating with genuine heartfelt presence the way you would at church, then you should find someplace else to go.

There’s something physically active that everybody likes to do, even if it’s just walking the dog. Your job is to find out what that it is. Life is short. If you hate going to the gym, do us all a favor (especially those of us who actually like exercise) and just stop already.

You’re trying to lose weight. While exercise is obviously imperative for improving physical fitness and is also an important component for promoting health, a growing body of evidence corroborates that exercise is not a great means for losing weight.

While 100% of the energy you take in comes from food, only 10-30% of that energy is burned through physical activity (of which exercise is a subset). Your metabolism accounts for the other 60-80 percent of that burn, but many don’t focus on the biggest factor in addressing metabolism—your diet and how/when you eat!

Furthermore, weight gain is often an emotional issue and a question of compulsion and addiction more than anything. You wouldn’t look to solve a substance abuse problem at the gym, so why should obesity be any different?

Sure you can put yourself on an unsustainable fitness plan in order to lose weight, but you know how that story ends. The end result of many diets is that when you stop eating the fake diet food and heavily restricting calories, you’ll gain the weight back.

Similarly, when you stop exercising twice a day and doing HITT seven days a week, it’s the same story. If weight loss is your motive for exercising, instead of hiring a trainer and obsessively hitting the gym, consider getting to the root of the problem and hiring a good nutritionist and counselor.

You do it wrong. Half-baked reps, jerking your back like you’re on crack, or pedaling the spin bike a million miles an hour. Guys doing curls with no range of motion and gals doing a zillion crunches, the list goes on.

Reps, sets, exercise machines, and exercise routines are the tools to help you accomplish building your fitness project. Like any tool, these variables can be efficient mechanisms that help you get the job done.

But all tools can be dangerous when used incorrectly and it’s utterly tragic how disconnected many are from their tools. Whether your tool is a treadmill, a kettlebell, or the most important machine of all (your body), the bottom line is do it right or don’t do it at all. If you don’t know how, ask someone.

You aren’t getting better at something. If the point of going to church is to resolve your faith and deepen your relationship with the divine, then the goal of working out should be a better physical functionality, increased pliancy, or improved technical proficiency.

That’s not to say there won’t be ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. And certainly, the laws of physics dictate that you most definitely won’t continuously get bigger, stronger, or faster. Generally speaking though, the general trend of fitness should be clear—improvement. You should become a better athlete, more proficient at your craft, or simply more aware of your body in time and space.

Olympic lifting, gymnastics, and boxing are skills to hone, not just means of burning calories. The point is to be your own athlete, to practice and study, and get professional guidance. That said, if you don’t have your own coach, hire one, find a mentor, or join a community that cares.

You’re hurt. If doing squats hurts your back or running hurts your knees, I have some professional advice for you—stop! I’ve paid doctors and therapists of all kinds of cold hard cash to give me the exact same counsel. “If it hurts, don’t do it.” It makes perfect sense, but sometimes we don’t listen to our bodies despite their incessant nagging.

It isn’t courageous to exercise while injured or push through pain, it’s arrogant. True courage is having the wherewithal to stop and really address the root of your pain. I can’t spell it out any more plainly, if you’re hurt or exercise exacerbates your pain, you should stop, today.

You Have to Make It Count

Look, if you’re a fitness customer and you want to blow up the elliptical like you’re running from a zombie, or if you want to talk on the phone while you’re on the treadmill, or maybe you want to do side bends thinking you’re melting inches off of your waistline, than I suppose that’s your prerogative. But I wouldn’t go to your church unless I was serious about learning and worshiping with humility and introspection—the same logic applies to the gym.

Exercise because you like it. Exercise to get better at something. But do so with grace and proficiency and if you’re not willing to be a disciple of true wellness, do the rest of us a favor and stop exercising.

You might also like:

• 5 Totally Valid Reasons You Shouldn’t Exercise
• 5 Reasons To Work Out That Have Nothing To Do With A Bikini Body
• How To Better Your Workout Experience

The post You Should Stop Exercising appeared first on Breaking Muscle.