28 The Habit Overhaul

Your life isn’t determined by what you do once in a while, it’s determined by what you do on repeat. That’s why we’re digging into habits as the invisible architecture behind your health, productivity, focus, and even how you handle stress. We lean on the core idea from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems and once you see your routines as a system, you can actually change them. 

We break down the difference between good habits that compound in your favor and bad habits that compound against you, then we get practical about behavior change. Instead of betting everything on motivation or willpower, we talk about cues, routines, and environment design. You’ll hear simple ways to add friction to the stuff you want to do less of: logging out of apps, moving distractions, removing trigger foods, turning off notifications, and setting boundaries like no phone in the bedroom. 

Then we flip it and make good habits easier. We walk through habit replacement so you don’t leave an empty gap, plus tools like the two-minute rule and habit stacking to make consistency feel almost automatic. We also share how to “upgrade” habits you already do well with batching, better meeting structure, and intentional planning before you open your inbox. Finally, we tie it all to identity-based habits, because the fastest way to change what you do is to change who you believe you are becoming. 

If this helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s trying to reset their routines, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s the one habit you’re improving this week?

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, PC - WoodsandBates.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Welcome back. What if I told you that your life isn't determined by what you do occasionally, but that it's determined by what you do consistently? And most of those actions aren't decisions, they're habits. That's what I want to talk about today is our habits. James Clear's book Atomic Habits says you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And I believe that to be true. Habits are our invisible architecture of our lives.

Habits Run Your Life

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Or in other words, they're our systems. They're the way we lead our lives. These run automatically. I mean, I can remember sitting in a car and I get to my destination and I can't remember how I got there because it's so ingrained, having done it so many times over and over and over. These are things like how you start your day, how you respond to stress, how you manage your time. Those are all our habits. And I know when I think about waking up in the morning, I do very much the same things every single day. Brush your teeth, do all those things. And I bet for most people it's pretty similar on a day-to-day basis. And that's not something that we've necessarily created. That's just what we do, and those are our habits. So there's a difference between good habits and bad habits. Our good habits compound in our favor and they increase our positive outcomes. Our bad habits are compounding against us, and those are the those are the reasons why we have some of the negative outcomes. So every habit we have is a vote for the type of person we want to be. And these can be very, very difficult to change. Most people try to change habits by doing things like making New Year's resolutions or relying on

Why Willpower Usually Fails

SPEAKER_00 2:09

motivation, making big, huge, sudden changes, or using willpower. And at some point or another, that's going to fail. We're going to lose motivation. We're not going to be real, have a lot of willpower to do some of these things, and then we're going to be frustrated because we haven't been able to change these habits. These habits are built into our environment and they're tied to cues and routines that we do on a consistent basis. So they're reinforced by repetition over and over again again. And you can't just break these right away. You have to replace and redesign these in order to make them better. So how do you break a negative habit? You've determined this is something that I don't want to do anymore. One of the ways is you can make it harder. So increase friction around that. Move your distractions away from you, log out of your apps, or remove the things that are the triggering events that cause you to pick up that phone and start doom scrolling. And we've talked before about brick device, we've talked about a don't do list, how to control the email, things like that. The more difficult we make

Add Friction To Bad Habits

SPEAKER_00 3:15

these things, the more likely it is that we're going to be able to change that habit around it. So we could ask ourselves what triggers this habit? And then maybe remove that cue. If scrolling is caused by stress, maybe we notice that stress is creeping in and we go for a walk instead. If our destructive snacking is caused by boredom, maybe we remove those unhealthy snacks from our house. If notifications are the reason why we're checking our email constantly, maybe we turn those notifications off. Change our environment where we don't have a phone in the bedroom. We don't have those notifications dinging at us. Change our workspace around so that it's clean. You know, we're not stressed out right when we walk into the office. So some of these we don't necessarily want to just eliminate. We want to replace with better habits because if we just eliminate our bad habits, it's going to leave a gap. And so we want to replace those things with, okay, here's the trigger. Instead of scrolling, I'm going to go for that walk. Or instead of grabbing that soda out of the fridge, I'm going to pour a glass of water. Or whatever it is, we're planning for it instead of reacting instinctively the way that we always have. So we're not removing them necessarily, we're redirecting them or replacing them

Replace The Habit Without A Gap

SPEAKER_00 4:37

with better habits. So we want to identify the clear trigger and maybe we create the clear trigger. So I want to start working out. How can I do that? Maybe we lay our clothes out the night before, and those are ready so that we can just put them on, and then that pushes us toward the gym or whatever we're going to do for our workout. These do not have to be huge. We can start small, we can use, you know, a two-minute rule. We're going to read one page a day, or we're going to do one push-up. And usually activity leads to more activity. So maybe we want to pair it with something that we already enjoy. Stack those habits. So every day I make coffee. Okay. Once I've made my coffee, I sit down and I'm going to review my day. So now those are combined and those are attractive because I like to have that coffee. So that's a trigger to review my day and get ready for my day. Gives us an immediate reward because we're doing that thing. It's helping us track our progress and check that box. So that helps too. And making good habits easy is one strategy, but we also want to make bad habits difficult. Sometimes we don't want to just replace habits. Maybe we have some good habits and we want to upgrade those in some way, shape, or form. We just want better versions of those habits. So

Make Good Habits Easy

SPEAKER_00 5:55

we've gotten into a pretty good rhythm of processing our email twice a day, maybe. Okay. How can we how can we even be better at that? Maybe we can batch those emails into groups or get an AI program that does that for us. Maybe our meetings could be more structured. Maybe we start creating an agenda for all of our meetings. Plan our morning out, you know, not necessarily just react. We want to do this, this, this, and this before we open up our email client. And then maybe we want to sit down and start our day with here's my big win from yesterday. So we start on a positive note. A lot of this can be incorporated into our perfect week that we've created. As we're revising that on a weekly basis, batching helps. When we're planning that day, we're hopefully going to win that day, or we're going to be a lot more likely to win that day. Optimizing

Upgrade What Already Works

SPEAKER_00 6:49

good habits beats trying to reinvent ourselves every time because we're already doing something well. We just want to improve on that. Some of these habits are identity-based, so we want to focus our shift on who we want to become, not necessarily what we want to do. So instead of I want to exercise, we're going to start telling ourselves, I am somebody who takes care of my health. And the exercise is going to follow. I want to be productive. Yeah, that's nice, but we want to be someone who manages time intentionally. I want to stop insert your vice, drinking, scrolling, drugs, whatever. Instead, we're going to become someone who doesn't do those things. Your habits are going to follow your identity. So if you are somebody that takes

Identity Based Habits And The Challenge

SPEAKER_00 7:34

care of your health, you're going to exercise, you're going to walk 10,000 steps a day, whatever that is. My challenge to you this week is to pick one habit to improve. Make it very obvious for yourself. You know, set yourself up to level that habit up. Pick something that you already do well. Make it easy, make it more repeatable, and make it intentional. If you wanted to, you could play replace one bad habit with a better alternative. But I think in order to start getting some progress on that, leveling up one of the habits you already do is going to be a lot easier. Start small, just stay consistent. You don't need massive change for this. You just need small, consistent improvements because over time, those are going to compound just like interest, and they're going to change your entire life. We're building better habits, we're improving our operating system for our life. That's how we're going to maximize our time and elevate our life.