This chapter is meant to guide you after your first thirty days have passed. If you made it through the 30 days you should be feeling pretty good about yourself.
But now is not the time to slack off and let your guard down because even though you have ingrained those habits into your brain, you are still going to have to put forth some effort for the next few weeks.
This will be nowhere near the monumental effort that you had to make during the first 30 days, but it is still going to take some work. Here are some steps to follow as you leave the training level and progress to the maintenance one.
Step One: Do a Self-Evaluation
The first thing that you need to do is an honest, no-holds-barred self-evaluation. You need to determine if 1) you tried as hard as you could and put forth your best effort over the past 30 days and 2) if you feel that your habits are deeply ingrained.
Step Two: Repeat if Necessary
Remember, these are habits that you are forming to reach a goal in 12 months. If you do not have a good foundation then you are not going to reach your goal. If you haven’t been able to ingrain these habits as deeply as you’d like, then go through the thirty day process again.
Step Three: Determine Your Next Step
Assuming that you aren’t going to repeat your 30 day cycle again, decide what your next step is going to be. You may have a whole new list of habits that you want to start developing in order to reach your goal after 12 months.
Step Four: Don’t Forget Reinforcement
Even as you are developing new habits, if you find yourself slacking off or forgetting about habits that you have already developed then make sure that you reinforce them with thought and action. You don’t want to lose what you worked so hard to attain in the first place.
What a Year of Habit Development Might Look Like
In this section, we are going to try to project your habit development into the future so that you can see what happens beyond the initial 30 days. For simplicity’s sake, we will take just two goals and work with them over a 12 month timeline.
In this case, we are using the following 12-month goals:
- Lose 50 pounds, get in better shape, improve health
- Create an alternative income stream of $12K per year
So, now we have the two goals. Let’s determine what sort of habits might have been chosen for the first 30 day period.
- Work out daily for 30 minutes
- Cut down by 500 calories per day
As mentioned, sometimes you have to create complementary habits in order to make actions a reality. In this case, we have an exercise habit that can pretty much stand on its own. The only way that you might add to it is by coming up with daily goals or habits for your specific workouts.
For example, if you are doing strength training on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, cardio on Thursday and Saturday and abs on Sunday, then you can come up with individual fitness goals for those activities, perhaps using one of the hundreds of apps available.
As for the diet goal, you are going to need some way to track whether or not you are actually cutting out 3500 calories per week. Again, apps like MyFitnessPal come to mind.
The point is, you will need a plan that incorporates several habits if you want to make these generalized habits stick – and actually work towards your main two goals. Let’s take a look at what that specific plan might look like.
30 Day Plan for Developing Habits
Habit 1: Log meals immediately into MyFitnessPal App [Trigger: Eating]
Habit 2: Keep track of calories throughout the day and take in 500 calories below amount needed to maintain weight (app will tell you). [Trigger: Logging meals]
Habit 3: Spend 30 minutes per day working out [Trigger: Waking up]
Habit 4: Track workout progress using YourGymDaily (Name made up) app. Enter reps, weight, sets, etc. [Trigger: After finishing sets]
Habit 5: Follow goals outlined by the app and put forth as much effort as possible to achieve them. [Trigger: review prior to workout]
The Rest of the Year
As you can imagine, the rest of the year might look similar. But the difference is, you are going to be tracking your progress the entire way through the apps or some other method.
You may have to change your triggers as your life and circumstances change, but your habits should remain basically the same, unless you find that you are absolutely unable to do them as they are, in which case, they must be adjusted.
