Let’s get you building Great Habits and doing more yoga today!
I’m Heather Larson and I’m a longtime yogini currently completing my RYT-200. That’s where the yoga portion of this comes from. I’m also a Certified Transformational Life Coach, which is where the great habits come in.
I know a thing or two about habits.
I used to have some really bad ones that involved alcohol. Now I’m 8 years sober from booze and concentrating only on building great habits rather than breaking bad ones. I spent 4.5 years working in the addiction field coaching the worst of the worst in my city into sobriety. At detox, jail, and a recovery center I was there to help my clients figure out what could made change stick for them.
When I say I’ve spent a lot of time on habits, I am not kidding!
What makes a Great Habit stick?
Let’s start with the basic building block of consistentcy.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
-Aristotle
If you don’t want to be addicted to alcohol, for example, you have to consistently NOT drink. If you want to get in shape, you have to repeatedly exercise. You’re not sober if you drink 28 days of the month but dry out for two. You’re also not in shape by doing a hike one weekend a month. Each scenario is better than doing nothing towards making change. But if you want to accumulate better health in both cases, you need to create a good habit.
So where do people fail at creating great habits?
I’ve seen people fight against consistency over and over. Some of it can be procrastination, some is self-sabotage, and sometimes it’s just having too much going on in life—people can’t fit in “one more thing.” The common denominator to all this is fear of change. We want change. We want to let go our bad habits and become the people we dream about becoming.
But change brings friction and discomfort. It doesn’t feel natural. We feel awkward. We fear making mistakes. We want things to turn out perfect.
If you want to create new, Great Habits, a couple things have to happen.
1. Release the old, bad habits
2. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort and awkwardness it takes to create a new, consistent habit.
You’re going to mess up.
You’re going to do something great for 10 days, then totally forget. I did that with my Duo Lingo language streak last month on Day 29. I had practiced my French and Polish every day for 29 days in a row! It felt amazing! Then, I woke up on Day 30 and realized I hadn’t touched the app all day on Day 29. My streak had died!
I felt so bad! But, life happens. I didn’t make up a story about it or beat myself up. I simply accepted that I’d just have to restart my streak from zero. Then the app challenged me to do some hard language practice to get my streak back! It was nice that I was forced to stretch past my edge a bit. Now I’ve hit Day 31 and counting…
The point is to challenge yourself to do that new habit you want consistently by pushing yourself to do it when you don’t feel like it. Or when you feel discouraged about it. Or when you have doubts about it. Every single day I feel like I’m never going to learn to speak Polish. But I just keep trying. It’s hard! But it’s impossible if I give up or get lazy about it.
We’ll get deeper into work around habits as this Substack gets rolling. This is just the beginning.
Now for the Yoga!
I have two juicy practices for you.
One is actually a laundry list of yoga practices for remote workers that I wrote for YogiApproved.com. Since I’m someone who benefits from yoga as a remote worker, I immediately used my newfound remote worker status this year to help inspire this list.
"Work From Home? These 5 Online Yoga Classes Cover All Your Needs!"
Real Yoga: Another practice that can change your life is a live event that starts next week.
It will take you off your mat but deeper into the practice of yoga. This challenge is FREE, I’ve done it a couple times now, and I can’t say enough about what I’ve learned from Eric in the past year.
If you do yoga only for fitness, not only are you just spinning your wheels, you’re truly missing out on what the practice can really do for you. There’s so much more to yoga than performing asana (postures) on a mat.
Yoga’s not about breaking a sweat.
Yoga’s about breaking out of your shell, breaking your own bad habits, and breaking yourself wide open. Among other things. Eric’s teachings have helped me access such a space over the past year like nothing else I’ve done in yoga since 1996.
So please sign up. You have nothing to lose—except for some bad habits 😉