A More Beautiful Life Collective

Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a five-star rating and review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube to never miss an episode and help this podcast reach new people! This week, we are focusing on habits and how to get them to stick. Listen for an overview about how habits work and how you can decide what habits you want to create.

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Links: 

• The Purpose Planner by A More Beautiful Life Collective on Etsy
• Habits Guide & Booklist 
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg
• Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley
• The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley

Download the notes for our habits survey here. You can subscribe to the blog to access our free subscriber library for more bible studies, devotionals, and printables. 

Here at A More Beautiful Life Collective, we know that the hectic hurry of everyday life can drown out our focus on what matters. This podcast is a moment to intentionally pause and realign our focus. Together, we’re working to find the rhythm of Peace in him through the pace of beauty and order. Thanks so much for joining me. 

What Do You Want Your Life To Look Like

Welcome back to A More Beautiful Life Collective, I’m so glad that you’re here! And I’m so glad to have this chance to continue talking about habits. These past few weeks have been crazy. Over the summer, we’ve gone to a lot of different places. We were basically out of town for about a month. We went to the UK for an anniversary trip, and then we came back and we went to a church trip. And then we came back and then we went to the beach. In between that, the kids got hand, foot, mouth. And so really, during the whole month of July and a little bit of August, we had this time where we were just basically out of town, out of routine. And a lot of the habits that we have put in place were really not working for us anymore. 

And so this is where today as we come in, we talked about the importance of habits, which is what we focused on in the last episode. Today, I want us to think about the habits that we want to have in our lives. And if I look back at the past few months, one of the things that I’ve noticed is, when I have steady routines, rhythms, and anchors in place in my life, the whole day changes. But whenever I give up all my habits, then everything that I want to get done, it kind of falls by the wayside, and I end up surviving. 

So if you feel like in your life, you’re kind of surviving. You’re not thriving, you’re just going through every day, and you’re not getting to the things that you need to get done, then maybe that’s one of the issues is that you don’t have these habits in place. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode. How do you figure out what habits to have? And then how do you consistently and routinely put them into place in your life? 

Determine Your Aspirations

So one of the things that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks, is a planner that kind of focuses on these things. And so you can actually find that on Etsy, if you go to the show notes for this episode, you can find a link that will lead you to that, and that is The Purpose Planner. 

But one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how can you create the routines that you want for your life. And so I think the first thing that you have to do is you have to figure out the type of person you want to be. Some of you guys will know this right away. You know that you want to be a runner, or you want to be a reader, or maybe you want to learn this language. 

But some of us may not know those things: what do you want to be? 

And so I want you to think about that, first off, if you had to decide in your life who you want to be, what would you say you can use some of those questions that we talked about in the last episode, to help you understand who you want to be. Now, if you notice, hey, I spend a lot of time on technology. And I feel guilty about that. Maybe that’s showing you that you want to be someone who’s not so dependent upon technology to go about your everyday life. Or maybe you are someone who wants to be a reader, but you don’t really read, or maybe like me, I have always wanted to be a runner and to run longer races, long-distance races. One of my bucket list things for my life is I want to run a marathon. But as of right now, I haven’t done it. And so really what that means is I know I have this goal, and what I call these goals as our aspiration is things that I want to be this ideal that I want to reach. But for some reason, I’m not getting there. 

Set Your Goals

And so this is where now that you know this aspiration for whatever you want to do in life. The next thing you have to do is after you find the aspiration, then you can establish your goals. Probably what you want these goals to be is something that you can measure something that you can attain. You also if you follow this SMART acronym, you also want them to be timely. So you set a time parameter on that. But you want to establish goals for each of the aspirations that you have. I think that’s the next important step. 

So let’s go back to that example. Okay, let’s say I want to be a runner. That is my aspiration. I’ve always wanted to be that person. Well, maybe my goal could be and this is a common goal, you know, after New Year’s resolutions or whatever. My goal is that I want to run a 5k and a lot of times what people do is say, Okay, I want to do this thing. And so they say, Okay, I’m going to run a 5k by October. And so it seems to follow the SMART goal acronym. It seems to be measurable, attainable, timely. 

Establish Your Habits

But the thing is with that, if you just stop there, you’re probably not going to reach your goal. Because you need to create habits that get you to your goal, you need to wake up and go to the gym. For a long time, I wanted to be a runner, but the thing that I never did was lace up my shoes and go out the door. So how can I make that happen? And so this is where habits come in. 

So one of the things that I read, this is in the book, Atomic Habits, which is a great book, phenomenal book. I would recommend anyone to read it. Atomic Habits says this, “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses and see how your daily choices will compound 10 or 20 years down the line.” 

So if you want to get to a certain point, you need to look at your daily choices. And so that’s why I say you need to start with your why you need to start with your ideal, your aspiration, what do you want to be. Then you can say, okay, from what I want to be, this is my goal for right now. You know, if I haven’t been running, my goal shouldn’t be to run a marathon by next year. I mean, it could be but that’s probably not sustainable. But I can’t say okay, I want to run a 5k in the next year. 

But then I need to figure out how I can make a daily choice to get to that point. And so as we think about these things are always want us to remind ourselves of this verse. And I think this applies to anyone this verse says, “The wisest woman builds her house, but folly with her own hands, tears it down.” Proverbs 14:1

So as we think about these verses, and it goes back to those key verses that we listened to in the last episode, and if you haven’t listened to that, I encourage you to pause and go back and listen to episode one. But I want you to think about this, how is each choice that you make? How is it building your life? If you look at your life now and you continue moving in the same place? Are you building your life into something that you’d be proud of something that reaches the goals that you aspire to? Or is it something that you look at in your life and you wish that you could change things, now is the day to change. 

Habits to Change Your Life

So as you look at the different areas of your life, one of the things I’ve recommended in the planner, and also in the habit guide that you can download online at the blog at amorebeautifullifecollective.com. You can look at different areas of your life. And I would write an aspiration that you have. Then think about a goal that you want to do in your relationships with your family, your friends, your community, your job, your work, your finances, personal hobbies, and health. I want you to think about a specific thing that you want to get done something that you would aspire to. And then as you look at those things, I want you to add in habits to your life that help you reach those goals. 

Check out our shop for our Aspirations, Goals, and Habits Workbook!

Atomic Habits says this, “Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” And I love that I think habits are us creating systems to meet our goals. And so if we want to establish those things, you know, there’s really high goals that we have, whether that’s to wake up every day and read our Bible, or to wake up every day and go running, you need to have a system in place that’s going to get you out the door. I think about this, you know, we have this idea of what we have already done and what we are going to become. And so I want us to make sure that we are becoming something valuable, something good.

And so to think about what we need to do to actually accomplish something, I want you to think about the current habits that you already have. So we have our goals, we have what we want to do. And you may already have habits in your mind that you want to start heading into life. But I also want you to look at your current habits. 

I think it’s good to have like a time assessment of how we spend our days. One of the things that I love to do and we’ll talk about technology more but I’d love to look at my screen time and it makes me guilty sometimes sometimes it makes me proud. But I’ve always been trying to limit my screen time to like under an hour for like, you know, fun things, you know, just scrolling through Instagram and stuff.

But what I’ve noticed is a lot of times it’s way over that and that thing is, I don’t want that for my life, I don’t want my life to be something where I am constantly on my phone. But if I never check the amount of time that I spend doing things, I very easily fall into the trap of spending all my time doing things I don’t want to do. So that you don’t have any time to do the habits that you want to. Even some things that are good. If they’re things like reading, I love to read. But sometimes you can not really understand how much time you’re spending doing those things. And maybe you’re not accomplishing what you need to do.

If I’m reading all the time, especially just reading, you know, novels, I love to read for fun. And so, you know, if I pick up a book in the morning, and I spend an hour reading, and then I read during that time, and then I read at night, I may have not accomplished the things I need to do for a podcast. And then because of that, I am not getting things done. And I’m not accomplishing the habits that I want to have, I’m not accomplishing the goals that I want to do. I think the same thing, you know, whenever we’re watching shows, even if it’s something you know, I really liked documentaries, I’m not a huge fan of like, you know, fake TV shows. I would much rather prefer to read them than watch TV, but I love documentaries. But if I binge-watch a Netflix documentary, especially a true crime documentary, that is not going to be something that’s going to help me achieve my goals. 

So we know that we are shaped by our habits. 

Habits as Worship

There was a study from Duke University, which said that as much as 40% of the actions we take every day are not the products of our choices but of habits. And so thinking about this, our habits are something that we repeat regularly. The Common Rule, which is another book by Justin Whitmore Earley, says in this book, that “A liturgy is just a pattern of words or actions repeated regularly as a way of worship. And so our habits are a form of worship.” And interestingly, one of the things that he connects with this is that, you know, we want our habits to be spiritual disciplines, things that we do that we kind of know or worship, if I get up every morning and read my Bible, one, that’s a habit. And two, that’s clearly an act of worship. If I get up every day and pray, or if I call a friend, or if I regularly worship if you do a hymn study with your family and sing, or if I sing every Wednesday or Sunday at church, those are things that are regular habits. But they’re also very clearly regular ways of worshipping and connecting with God. 

But we also have idols in our life, that we may not understand that we’re worshipping through our habits. If every day the first thing that I check is my phone, and I spend 30 minutes looking at my phone, and I can’t rip my eyes away, in order to do my Bible reading. I’m worshiping social media, or whatever I get from that, instead of worshiping God with that time. One of the things that he says in his book, The Common Rule, he says, describes how habits often obscure what we’re really worshipping. But that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping something. Later on, he says “Worship is formation and formation as worship as the psalmist put it, those who make interest in idols will become like them. So we become our habits.” 

And this is really why as we think about habits, I think this is so important for the Christian walk, our habits create us, they shape our identity, even Atomic Habits. That’s where he talks about in his book, that we have these goals, again, our aspirations. And so we can either set what we aspire to be by making these goals by being intentional about it. Or we can allow our habits to change everything about us. And so our habits will shape our identity. 

You can think about habits that we think are not good, whether that’s spending hours and hours on phones, drugs, alcohol, whatever, staying up too late. These things normally people are not intentional about. They don’t want to pursue that life. And they probably are not proud of that thing. But because they’re not intentional about choosing the good things, they end up settling for the lesser things. 

How to Make Habits That Stick

So if you look at your current habits, I think it’s important to make a list. So get out a sheet of notebook paper, write it down, and make a list of the current habits that you have. It could be the cup of coffee that you have in the morning. It could be the thing that you do before you go to work. Maybe it could be what you do on your drive to work. It’s the things that are automated. So every morning, I have a routine where I get up, I turn on the coffeemaker, and I unload the dishwasher. And then I have my coffee, I did not always have that routine. When we first got married, we didn’t have a dishwasher. But even whenever we moved into the house where we did have one, the dishwasher just kind of didn’t get used. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. But a lot of times, there was a huge pile of dishes on the counter. And so every day they were there. And it made me so stressed waking up in the morning and seeing all these dishes that I needed to do. And a lot of times, I would look at that, and I would try to get them done in the morning. But then I will lose the whole morning that I had before, I’d have to go to work, do dishes, and that’s all I would do, I would do dishes, and I might make a breakfast to take with me. Or maybe I wouldn’t even eat breakfast. And I would make a lunch. Sometimes I didn’t even make lunch because I didn’t have any time. And so that action of saying, Okay, what I’m going to do every day is I’m going to have this habit of, Wow, I’m doing something that I do already, I’m going to attach this thing of doing my dishes, cleaning off the counter, so that I have a peaceful home a home that I want to wake up. And that was something that was little, but it really has been life-changing. 

And so we’re gonna look at some more ways that you can create these habits in your life. But I think it’s really important to understand that your habits shape your identity and your habits. They are a form of worship, they are forming you. And so you want to be intentional about making habits that are gonna form you well, that are going to do good things for your life. And you can change that, if you’re intentional about it. 

But you have to be intentional about that 40% of your life, you have to be intentional about creating habits that are going to serve you well. In the common rule, one of the reasons why he calls it that is he likens it to the rule of life that you see in monasteries.

What he says is he describes it this way he says, “It’s a term for a pattern of communicable habits per formation. As seen in monasteries, habits are the gears by which to direct life toward the purpose of love. In fact, the word rule is used because it comes from the Latin word regular, a word associated with a bar or a trellis. The idea is that we like plants are always growing and changing. The rule of life is intended to pattern communal life in the direction of purpose and love instead of chaos and decay.”

So we have a choice with our habits, we have the choice to turn our life towards love, and we have the choice to turn our life towards God if we train our habits in the way they should go. But we can easily allow it to go into chaos and decay before. Whenever I was just stacking my dishes on top of one another hoping that they wouldn’t fall over, that was the state of chaos indicating that my house was in utter chaos. And there were times where you know, things wouldn’t get put away. Food was out overnight. So as the literal decay. If you’re not intentional, that’s what’s going to happen. And so it requires you pausing, and making sure that you are choosing good habits. 

Now, how do you create a habit that you actually stick to? Well, there’s lots of good books that you can look atwhen you go and get Atomic Habits, it talks about that. You can also look at Tiny Habits. I’ve read both of those. And those are great. Another one that’s highly recommended, but haven’t read yet is The Power of Habit. And they all talk about similar ideas. But basically what these ideas are, is you need to pick tiny habits, so little things that you can easily add into your life. And the reason why they need to be tiny. So like, miniscule, is because you need to make something that’s so easy, that your brain doesn’t feel like it’s hard to do. So that you automatically jump in. 

I hear that some people talk about homemaking. And so one of the things people hate to do so laundry, right, and so laundry, if you wait, and you let the laundry pile up, and then you let the laundry so you have dirty laundry everywhere. And then you say okay, I need to wash all this laundry. And so it becomes this big thing where the whole day is spent in the laundry room, and you spend it washing and folding clothes. Then it becomes almost like a project. It’s like an event. And so because of that it’s something that you kind of procrastinate, you put it off because it’s going to take you you know, an hour to fold on the laundry. And I’ve done that before where I literally spent an hour folding laundry all at once. But if you do it a little bit each day, technically it’s the same amount of time, but it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. And because it’s not that big of a deal. It’s something that you don’t have to procrastinate. For, it’s something that it’s not a project where you keep putting it off, it’s just something that you do you barely think about it and you move on. Now the reason why this is important is because you don’t get into it if you can just do it quickly, without convincing yourself to do it, because you’re doing it because it’s the habit, then you don’t tap into that willpower. 

They even say, and I’ve heard this, you know, with teaching, that every time that you use some willpower to do something, you’re depleting your willpower, so you only have a certain amount in the day. And so you don’t want to let your willpower go down, right, you want to make habits in your life, where you don’t have to tap into that because it’s gonna go down anyway, whenever you’re dealing with kids. With picking healthy foods, with making sure that you turn off that next episode on Netflix, you’re gonna have to use your willpower to do those things. So you don’t want to use them all up on easy decisions that could just be habits. And so you want them to be tiny habits that are not a big thing. Now some tiny habits are going to look different than others. One of the habits that I’ve recently got into is I’ve been trying to go to the gym, you know, for years I’ve been trying to work out figure out a way to work out. But any mom with young kids notices that anytime you’re trying to work out, it is just an ordeal. Whenever I was working out at home, I always had a kid that was like crawling on top of me.

Or it just wouldn’t get done because we kept putting it off because I wanted a quiet focus time or I’d have to wake up really early in the morning. And then I will lose my time for other things. And so what I did is I joined a gym, and that gym had childcare. And now I’m actually working out regularly. Now the thing about this is, it is a bigger deal, because I’m paying for the place so it’s not free, and then I have to drive to the place. So technically, I’m taking longer than if I could work out at home. But technically, this habit feels less difficult for me because I have to go somewhere and then I get time to myself. So I think one of the things about these tiny habits is you need to understand the level of difficulty of the habit.

But then also you have to understand is this habit life-giving for me, Sally Clarkson, who is amazing, we’ll look at some of her work later on. But one of the things that she says is, you want to have a life-giving home, you want your kitchen table to be a life-giving table where your family meals are good. And really this idea of life-giving is something that I look at with basically any habits or anything that I do the things that you want to do, you want it to be something that fills you up. So if you can attach some of these habits that you have to do and make it something that’s life-giving, you’ll be more likely to do it because you will enjoy it. 

Basically what we’re getting at here is you’re creating habits, you’re engineering them to make them enjoyable. So what you have to do is you have to find a tiny habit, and then you want to attach it to other habits. So this is what’s called habit stacking. So basically, if I know that every day, going back to your list of habits that you’ve already made if I know that every day, I have a cue of making coffee, I’m going to make that every day, I’m addicted to my coffee. And so I’m going to do that. Whenever I wake up in the morning, that’s the first thing that I do that is already my habit, that would be my cue. And so then what I would understand is, I need to have some kind of motivation. So for my coffee, my routine of unloading the dishwasher, I have my cue of turning on the coffeemaker, and then every night I start the dishwasher. So in the morning, my coffee cup and have like a milk brother, because we have an espresso machine, it’s in the dishwasher, and so I pulled it out. And then after I pull that out, I’m able to just automatically start unloading the dishwasher. So while my coffee is being made, I’m unloading the dishwasher because I’ve already started that process. And so then the reward obviously is I don’t have any dishes in the sink because I can just automatically load the dishwasher. Another thing that I do, as I’m doing my habit stacking is so I have that list of what I’ve done. Then, once my coffee is made, the first thing that I do is set it on my kitchen table. The reason why I do that is once I get finished unloading the dishwasher, then I do my Bible reading. So having my coffee on the table becomes the next cue to start the next habit which is doing the Bible reading.

So you can see what you’re doing once you have your list of habits, you can use that list of habits to attach these other tiny habits. It doesn’t take really any willpower to set my coffee on the table. And doing that reminds me to go get my Bible-reading stuff to start the next habit. I’ve heard other people say Um, you know, you could have, I’m talking about my morning routine, but you could have habits like every day, whenever you leave the driveway, as you put on your seatbelt, you pray. And I’ve done that before. And I even got in the habit so much that my son said, Okay, we need to pray. And he’s only three. 

So people get into these habits, and you can attach them to really anything that you do consistently every day, if you’re not doing it consistently, don’t add on your list of habits to try to do habit stacking with. So if it’s something that you’re intentionally trying to go to the gym, you probably shouldn’t stack a habit with going to the gym, if going to the gym is the habit that you’re trying to work on, and create. 

So, as you look at all of these habits, that we’re going to talk about over the next several weeks, I just want you to keep in mind, how you want your life to look. And so to do that, you really need to think about how to create your habits and how to do it well. So you start with these aspirations of where you want to be, what you want your rule of life to be. And then after you look at those aspirations, you can create goals. And then think about actionable habits, tiny habits that you can do. Then you can use that to create a routine and a rhythm for your life that you love. All of the things that we talked about today. Again, you can find the quotes in the book lists for everything that we talked about. On the blog, if you subscribe, you’ll find a link where you can download these notes, they’ll also be in the show notes, and you can also download them. If you go to Etsy, you can purchase a copy of the purpose planner. And so the purpose planner, goes through and walks you through step by step, everything that we’ve been talking about today so that you can create habits.

And then there’s actually a way that you can make a list of all the habits and things that you want to do in your life. And then after you make that list, you can use those habits and those goals. And you can use those in your daily planning so that you can make sure that you’re consistently doing it. Because in the first little bit as you’re creating a habit, you do want to make sure that you’re tracking it and that you’re being mindful of it. Part of it is just a reminder. And you want to engineer your habits, so that you’re going back to these daily routines, and rhythms and you’re figuring out what you’re actually going to do. Some people, would not think that going to the gym is something that’s easy and going to the gym would actually be a deterrent to exercising. So instead of going to the gym, they might need to work on them. So they may need to subscribe to a YouTube channel where they do workouts. And so that would be the tiny habits. 

So you have to engineer your habits. And it’s not something that’s just going to be accomplished in a one-and-done kind of way. So today we’ve gotten into the nitty gritty of why habits are important, what habits we have, and how to create new habits. Over the course of the next several next episodes, we’re going to look at different spiritual disciplines, and also other areas of life where it’s important to have these habits. So thanks so much for joining me today. And I hope that you’ll join us next week.

Thanks so much for joining me at The More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. I’m Cayce Fletcher. And I hope I’ll see you next week.