#123 - Floors and Ceilings

Do you want a great tool to help you develop new habits? A tool that helps you focus on consistency more than perfection? Try making a ceiling and a floor for each habit. 
The 'ceiling' represents the ideal scenario, while the 'floor' is the bare minimum required to maintain the habit. Some days you will hit the ceiling. Other days you will congratulate yourself for hitting the floor. Listen in the learn more.  

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Transcript

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I'm jamielynn Stephan. And this is episode number 123 floors and ceilings. Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan, I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I just realized recently that I have never really done an official podcast on the idea of floors and ceilings, but it's a concept that I use all the time with my clients. And it's a concept that I learned from Brooke snow on her podcast, probably four or five years ago. And I found it so powerful for myself. So I want you to think about a habit you want to create, maybe it's to exercise. three times a week or meditate every day. Or to get better at saying personal prayers morning and night, maybe you are somebody who wants to get better at doing your makeup every day or reading to your kids every night or going outside every day. Maybe you want to develop a habit of doing family history once a week, or writing in your journal every day or deep cleaning a room every week. Maybe you want to get better at drinking more water during the day. Or maybe you want to have the habit of sitting down at the end of the day and writing out three things that you're grateful for from that day. Maybe you want to get better at doing scripture study with your kids every day or eating health here. Okay. These are just ideas of different habits that people are trying to develop at different times in their lives. And oftentimes part of the reason we end up abandoning our goal to create this habit that we want is because we can't do it perfectly all the time. We get sick. We don't really want to do it today. We have a really hectic week. The weather turns bad. You know, we like come up with all of these excuses. Some of them totally valid. Some of them not so much that make it so that we don't have the consistency to develop the habit. And then we quit. I love floors and ceilings for developing habits, because what it reminds us of is that. When it comes to developing a habit. Consistency is actually more important than perfection. It's the consistency not doing it perfectly every time that actually helps us develop the habit. So here's how floors and ceilings work. You take a habit you want to develop. And you set a ceiling and a floor for it. The ceiling is the perfect scenario. It's the vision your brain has when you first think, I really want to learn how to do that better. It's the way you would do it. If all the stars aligned, if you're not tired or hungry or distracted, it's the way you're going to do it on your most perfect day. Okay. That's the ceiling. It's what you're striving for all the time. Okay. The floor on the other hand is the very bare minimum you can possibly think of that you could do and still count it as doing what you were committed to doing. So it needs to be so simple. The floor has to be so small that you literally couldn't find an excuse not to do it. It's that easy. So in Brooke snow's podcast, you talked about setting a goal to do yoga every day for a year. She wanted that habit. If I remember correctly, her ceiling was that she would do 30 minutes of yoga a day. That is really what she wanted her daily yoga to look like was 30 minutes of yoga a day, but she recognized that she's a human. And that if she sets herself up to have to do 30 minutes of yoga every day for it to count. She wouldn't be able to, do that consistently. So then she set a floor for her daily yoga. This was the bare minimum that she was going to require herself to do. To be able to say I did my yoga for the day and what her floor was, was three cat cows. That was it. If she was sick, she was in a hotel room with all her kids. If she was traveling for several hours, if she forgot earlier in the day, whatever it was, she required herself to do three cat cows. And so in a year she did yoga every day. Sometimes she did 30 minutes of great yoga and sometimes she only did three cat cows. And oftentimes she was probably somewhere in between that, but she did it. She did yoga every day for a year. And her theory behind ceilings and floors is that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. That is a scripture from the book of Mormon that really aligns with this principle of ceilings and floors because it acknowledges that not only do the big things matter, but the small, consistent things have a great impact. I think about when I really wanted to get consistent at exercising. And I know I've shared this before, so bear with me, but I really wanted to exercise more consistently, but I had all these little kids at home. I was homeschooling. I was still having babies. My husband worked long days and nights and his medical residency. So he was not home a lot to watch the kids for me. I just felt like I didn't have time. And then one day someone mentioned Tony Horton's 10 minute trainer. And I thought I could do that. I have 10 minutes a day. I can give to exercise. Because I had it in my head that it had to be at least 30 minutes of exercise to make it count. I hadn't been doing any hardly, but Tony Horton had made the set of 10 minute videos that suddenly gave me permission to only do 10 minutes and call it exercise and call it. Good. So I got the videos and I started to do them every day. And some of them are quite hard, but they could be done right in my living room with my babies crawling around. And the yoga, the yoga video he had is so gentle. And so am I really tired, mom days? I just did the yoga, but I did it and I did 10 minute trainer for probably four years, maybe even five. Before I was introduced to Shaunti's T 20. Five, which was a series of 25 minute workouts. And I thought, I think I could do that. I don't have babies anymore. I've got kids going to school. I think I can make time. And I think my body's ready to kind of up that expectation of myself. And so I started doing 25. But even with T 25. There was this total body, which was my ceiling exercise. It was so painful. And then there was some that were a little easier. I can't remember the easiest one right now. It's not coming to me, but that became my floor for the days that I needed a floor day of just, I can't quite. Do my ceiling today. And then eventually I moved on to hour long classes of high fit and then on to running more and more. And all of this came about for me because of 10 minute trainer. By this small and simple thing, greater things have come to me. So I am a real believer that floors and ceilings are essential to your success in making a new habit. Another reason I love floors and ceilings for making habits is because it allows you to do what you say you're going to do with a much higher chance of success. And that will have a significant impact on your. Our relationship with yourself. Especially, if you have been someone who beats herself up for not doing the thing you want to do. Having a floor while you're building a habit, allows you to succeed way more. And that teaches your brain, that you know how to come through for yourself and your respect and your love for yourself will increase as well as your confidence in yourself. It is such a gift you will give to yourself. So, I just want to give you some examples from the list that I gave at the beginning of the podcast to help you get more ideas of floors and ceilings. Okay. So if you're somebody who thinks I want a deep clean one of my rooms every week, I just want to do that too. Get into the habit of cleaning stuff out and getting that taken care of. Okay. So your ceiling might be to completely clean a whole room. In a day. Top to bottom deep clean. Hey, that could be your ceiling. But your floor, maybe your floor would be, I'm going to deep, clean one tour. That's it. I'm going to pull everything out of one drawer. Okay. If you want to develop the habit to exercise three times a week, your ceiling might be 30 minutes of exercising when it's your exercise day. Your floor might be 10 crunchies or 10 squats, something like that. Something you can do on your bedroom floor or in your living room, as you watch a show or outside your car in the parking lot before you board a plane. If you want to meditate every day, maybe your ceiling is 15 minutes of meditation and your floor is to hold still. And focus on taking five deliberate breaths, focusing on your breath. If you want to make the habit of saying your prayers morning and night. Maybe your ceiling is I'm going to kneel down by my bed and I'm going to speak to God in a very formal way. I'm going to take a lot of time to do that. It's going to be very thoughtful. I'm going to write as I pray, maybe that is your ceiling, but your floor might just be at least to close your eyes and say, thank you Lord. For this day. I know some people want to get more into the habit of putting makeup on just as a way to have more self care. Just to pay better attention to themselves. So if you're somebody who's like, I want to put makeup on every day. Maybe your ceiling is full makeup, right? It's foundation, eye shadow mascara using the eyebrow pencil and all of that good stuff. And maybe your floor is I put on a pretty lip gloss or I put on mascara to something. Just simple. If you want to get into the habit of going outside every day, maybe your ceiling would be to be out for an hour. You're going to go for an hour long walk. You're going to do yard work for an hour. You're going to sit and read outside for an hour. That would be your ceiling. But your floor might just be, I'm going to open the door. I'm going to step outside. I'm going to count to 10 and I'm coming back in because that counts as going outside. And remember. I know some of this sounds totally ridiculous, but your goal is to make it something you will do that your brain can not make enough excuses for you not to do it. Is that simple? Okay. Learning to do family history. It holds a lot of interest for a lot of people and others of us feel a little more obligated to do it and feel intimidated by it. But let's say that you wanted to do family history once a week and your ceiling might be to spend at least an hour working on finding your ancestors and collecting more data and photos and stories. Whereas your floor could be taking a picture of someone in your family and recording information with it on your phone of what's going on. If, if an explanations needed right. So-and-so's 15th birthday. And that's it. Okay. That can count as family history. Maybe you want to get into the habit of drinking more water every day. So your ceiling might be, listen, I'm filling up this jug. It's got like 10 cups of water in it. And I am working deliberately all day to drink that water. Bruh as your floor just might be. Anytime I walk into my kitchen. I make sure I take a sip of water no matter what. Or I just fill this water bottle in the morning. And I just make sure, I at least sit at that all day. If you want to develop the habit of daily gratitude. You're sealing might be. I write down three things at the end of the day that I'm grateful for. And your floor might be. I just recite in my mind, three things. I'm grateful for. I was coaching a woman the other day who wants to get better at reading scriptures with her children on a daily basis. Her ceiling would be to gather them together and read a chapter of scriptures together. And I offered her that her floor could be something as simple as when everyone's kind of milling around. It could be like, Hey everybody. I have a scripture. I want to share with you. And then opening up her phone. Reading a quick scripture and letting everybody move on with their day after that. Eating healthier as a habit. So many of us talk about, but it feels daunting. And like, it's going to be so much work and frankly, not a lot of fun, but we all want to eat healthier. So if this is a habit you want to create, maybe your ceiling would be that you really eat that prescribed diet. Exactly. As you're supposed to, whatever that means to you. But your floor might just be, I just am sure that every day I eat. Uh, fruit or vegetable and that's my floor. And I can say that was healthy. Eating. I know some of you were thinking that the floors are ridiculous. And kind of like, they really shouldn't count. And I'm here to tell you that the floors and ceilings method doesn't work. If you can't give credit to the floors. Ceilings and floors are compassionate. They acknowledged that we are humans and that tomorrow my best will probably not look like my best as today. And in a week, it's not going to look the same either. We are not robots. We are humans and we have to let go of the idea that for things to count for us to be successful, we have to do it perfectly all the time. The key to building a strong habit is consistency. Not perfection. I want you to write that down. If you're struggling with this at all, I want you to believe it. If you don't believe it now, I want you to at least ask yourself, is it possible that I will benefit more from consistently doing something small than trying to make myself perfectly do something big and failing and failing and hating myself for it. The idea, especially when you're starting something you really haven't done before is consistency. I remember listening to a speaker named Wendy Ulrich, and she said, be willing to do something badly until you learn how to do it better. It's not because of the floor necessarily has to be the same as doing something badly, but the idea that we have to be willing to do something in perfectly or less than ideal. Or we're never going to learn how to do it better. So for this to work for you, you have to give yourself full credit when you do the floor and not the ceiling or anything in between. All of it gets credit. If you eat one veggie, you ate healthy today. If you finish a water bottles worth of water, you drank more water. If you stepped outside and breathe in fresh air for 10 seconds, you went outside. Give yourself credit. You don't have to drop the ideal of the ceiling, but you have to give yourself credit for consistency, no matter what it looks like. I really hope this has made sense, and I hope it gives some of you, the encouragement you need to start developing the habits. You may have been avoiding because you fear that you can't do them perfectly floors and ceilings. Everyone have a great week. Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamielynn Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at jamielynn Stephan coaching.