The following post was first shared in my monthly newsletter, the Kinsei-Do Fitness Nuggets, back in March 2022. With the calendar turning another page recently, some people - perhaps you too! - will have made resolutions to live healthier, eat better, exercise more, etc etc for this year, and this advice is likely to be helpful! According to James Clear, habit expert and author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits - a personal favorite of mine and one of my most-gifted books to clients and friends - whether you succeed in achieving your goals and desired behaviors has almost nothing to do with your willpower, or how much you think you want it. Surprised? I certainly was at first. So what is it then that determines your likelihood of success? Your environment. Consider this cheeky yet so true statement, also known as "Berardi's First Law", after the co-founder of Precision Nutrition and coaching guru Dr John Berardi: If a food is near you and conveniently available, you will eventually eat it. This appears so obvious that it doesn't even need to be stated, but if you think about it, it tells you exactly what you need to do (and not do) if you want to instil a new habit or positive behavior. You need to make sure that the "right" environmental cues are extremely obvious and omnipresent, and the "wrong" cues, the temptations, are out of sight and hard to do.
Or, back to James Clear, who says:
For this reason, redesigning your environment can be one of the most effective steps you can take to instil good habits. James Clear calls this process “environment design”, and its key goal is to make the cues of good habits more obvious (and bad ones harder to follow through on). Here are some examples:
Sounds obvious? Yeah. Easy to do even? Probably. But are you doing it? Did you find this tip relevant and useful? Would you like to receive more quick and actionable health and fitness tips? Then click here to subscribe to the monthly Fitness Nuggets!
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