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The podcast is here!
It’s here! Yay! A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Make sure you subscribe and leave a rating and a review so that you can be notified when a new post drops!
You can check out the first two episodes here and here. A new episode will drop every Wednesday, so stay tuned! Our first series on the podcast will focus on creating habits for a spiritually vibrant life.
Dreaming Up Our Goals
Years ago, I sat around dreaming with my friends. We wanted to do big things, and the current focus was running. We wanted to run a 5k, but why stop there? A marathon seemed more up to par with the measure of our goals. At 15, the sky is the limit and you feel impatient to have to deal with the constraints of sleep. You are ready to live.
We stayed up late drinking coffee, talking about the races we were going to run. We said that we were going to get together every day to train. We were going to sign up for our races based on the training plan we found online. A 5k by October, 10k by December. Marathon by May. We got this!
Except the next day, we never laced up our shoes. Or the day after that. Or the day after that.
We had big goals, but our daily actions never rose to the challenge of getting it done in the midst of a busy life.
Habits Help Us Meet Our Goals
We’ve all felt this way. The failed New Year’s Resolution. The yoga mat rolled up in the closet. It’s so hard to actually meet the lofty aspirations and ideals we have for ourselves.
I love to plan and dream, but when the rubber meets the road, I fall short. As a child and a young adult, I wasn’t as concerned with my lack of follow-through. It’s easy to think we have eternity to accomplish something when we are young and have the stars in our eyes. But, as I creep upwards in years, the brevity of life becomes more apparent.
One of the best books on creating new habits is Atomic Habits. In this book, James Clear describes how our systems of current habits fail to reach their full potential because they are not aligned with who we want to be. If we have a current habit of eating large fast food meals every day for lunch, but our goal is to eventually run a marathon, we know that something is wrong. We will eventually weigh 20 pounds heavier because we are choosing to supersize it instead of lacing up our running shoes to go for a run. There is hope though. The fault is not with us. It’s not that we are lazy. It’s that we need to figure out a system of habits that will help us to reach our goals. If we want to run a marathon, we have to set up a system of habits to get us out of the door and running.
Habits run our lives. In his book, The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley cites a study by Duke University which states that 40% of our decisions are made solely through habit. If we want to make a truly lasting change we need to assess the habits that we have to see if those habits will get us to the goals that we want. How are our daily decisions impacting the outcome of our life?
Determine Your Aspirations
If you didn’t catch it earlier, A More Beautiful Life Collective has a podcast! (Yay!) Every Wednesday, we will be releasing an episode that will give you practical tips for how to live a more beautiful life. Our first series on the podcast is going to focus on the importance of habits and how to create habits for a spiritually vibrant life. You can check out the first episode in the series here. Be sure to subscribe to get the podcast in your feed each week!
One of the first things we need to do when considering the habits we want in our lives is to figure out who we actually want to be. James Clear calls this identity-based habits. We want our habits to line up with our aspirations, but sometimes – in the midst of our hectic lives – we lose track of who we are and what we want for our lives. When we pause and consider our goals, then we can make a clearly defined ideal and vision for our lives. It’s so much easier to weed out our habits and replace them with new ones when we have a measuring stick of our aspirations.
For instance, in my running example, if one of my aspirations is to run a marathon, but my current exercise routine consists of doing 30 minutes of yoga a day, I can see that my current habit, which is a good and healthy one, does not line up with the ultimate goal I have for my life. We need these overall aspirations to help us know the difference between good and bad habits, what to train, and what to prune.
If you haven’t already checked it out, visit my Etsy shop, amorebeautifullifeco, to purchase a copy of The Purpose Planner. You can get 50% off your order with the code, HABITS. This planner is all about creating habits, rhythms, and routines to help you grow your best self.
You can purchase our Purpose Planner which has pages to plan out all your goals based on habits, or you can subscribe to the blog at the link below to get access to a printable guide on creating good habits.
Set Your Goals
Once you figured out your aspiration, the next step is to create goals that line up with your aspirations. This is where you can list out measurable goals that you want to achieve within a certain time frame. If I wanted to run a marathon, but I currently am not running at all, an attainable, measurable goal would be to run a 5k within 3-6 months. You want goals that you can see progress on, something you can work towards.
Figure Out Your Habits
Once you’ve established your goals, then we start to work on your habits. First, we want to look at the current habits in our daily lives. What do we like? What do we want to keep? What are things that we will always have in our life (our commute to work, morning cup of coffee)? What are things that we could potentially prune out of our lives (our nightly binge-watching of Netflix, the hour of scrolling Instagram)?
I recommend listing out all of your current habits and then deciding what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. Just like you declutter a house, sometimes it’s important to declutter your routines and rhythms. You can find a printable worksheet for this with the show notes for S1E2 of the Podcast here. This printable worksheet comes with all the notes for the podcast shows that we will be going over the next few weeks.
Once you have your current habits weeded out, then you can start organizing your life to match up with the aspirations you have. This may mean adding new habits or restructuring your current ones to be most productive.
Why Are Habits Important?
Why the emphasis on habit? In The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley describes habits in the following way: “To fully understand habits you must think of them as a liturgy. A liturgy is a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship. Our habits often obscure what we’re really worshiping but that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. […] Worship is formation, and formation is worship. As the psalmist put it, those who make and trust in idols will become like them (Psalm 31:6). So we become our habits.”
Our habits are a form of worship. When we are not training our habits towards the good and the beautiful, they are going towards chaos and decay. They are going towards idolatry. It is an everyday recommitment to turning our gaze on the Lord and patterning our life after what glorifies him.
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