The basic life decisions that we mess up on a daily basis aren’t hard. They just require planning and self discipline—and a vision of who and what you want to be. Want to develop an awesome health and wellness routine? Here are three things you can do.
Adopt a Framework
Frameworks are great. Hopefully you’ve seen my framework approach to exercise. If not, check it out. But there are frameworks for eating, too. Meat and veggies is a framework. That is, your meal only has meat and veggies. Not bread, fruit, dessert, meat and veggies. Just meat and veggies. It’s easier on the system.
Frameworks save you when stuff gets hard. Under stress we revert to training, so keep your training simple!
If you read books, have a framework for what you want to read. Novels, self-help, non-fiction, business, etc. Plan out books and subjects you want to read and line most of them up towards an intended goal. That goal might be relaxation or spiritual development or a bigger salary. But the framework helps you organize the approach.
Create a Basic Schedule
The next step is create a basic schedule. Morning, noon, evening. Carve some personal time into each of these time boxes and determine what you want to do with it. Exercise. Read. Plan. Stretch. You might not be able to do this for every evening or lunch or morning. But you have a plan.
During your reading, you can learn good recipes. You can read John Tilden’s Toxemia Explained. During your exercise you can learn to do kettlebells and body weight exercises. During your planning you can make yourself more efficient.
Make a Commitment to Stay Consistent
Behavior change is not a complicated matter, but it requires consistency. Consistency is a learned trait. The book Red Gold by Grigori Raiport talks about this. You can learn consistency by creating a useless routine, like putting a sock in another drawer in the morning and then putting it back in the evening.
You can also simply use an iron will to make the commitment, then continue to shower yourself with positive thoughts about how you are improving and visualize yourself as a person who does the things you set out to do. Read a book like the Magic of Thinking Big. If you read on the toilet, put this book by your toilet and read it whenever you poop.
Three simple steps, but there is work to be done in each of these steps. You do the work, consistently. You might fail. Don’t stop, don’t get upset, don’t make a big deal of the failure. Just think about what happened and you’ll generally find that your thought patterns failed you. Learn more about your thought patterns and keep on repeating the simple steps and you’ll identify the thoughts are taking you further from your purpose, and you’ll weed them out.
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P.S. When I wrote out poop before, the first thing that came to mind was Beavis saying poop. If you’re of that generation, enjoy the clip below: