The Key to Your Health Success (Actual Answer) | Staying Consistent, How to Know What Plan Works for You, How to Keep Track of Your Health + Wellness Journey

This is one of my favorite episodes. I walk you through an exercise I do with 99% of my clients that maps out success into easy action steps for good times and bad. If you enjoy the episode, I do not advertise - PLEASE LEAVE A RATING OR REVIEW ❤️
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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:Hello beautiful people and welcome back to the show today. I am going to hand you the keys to success And that is a promise i'm going to deliver on I really am going to hand you the key to your own success in your health and wellness journey so success, what is success?

 In your everyday routine when you're at home and you can go play. grocery shopping and all of those other things is not going to look the same as what success looks like on vacation, where you can't weigh or measure your food.

If you're tracking macros or you may not have control over every single meal, what does success look like in that circumstance? The first failure that always seems to stop people is defining success as one thing. And it's success is completely circumstantial because we're circumstantial as humans, right?

With our resources we have available at the time we have available with whatever. So the first thing I want you to do is take a second and think about What is success at home look like? Does that mean that you had protein at every meal? Does it mean you drank water? Does it mean you went for your walk that day?

Does it mean you got your workout in? What is the list of things that when you finish the day, if you did those things, you're like, that was a great day. That was a very successful day in the pursuit of my best self. Figure those things out. Once you have that list, that is going to be your framework. So, say you're going on vacation, right?

What we're going to do is we're going to take our original list and you're going to circle things that you absolutely can get done without ruining your experience. For example, drinking enough water. That isn't going to inhibit your vacation, you're not going to miss out on anything, that's a non negotiable.

Circle it. Go through the list, find every non negotiable that you can reasonably stick to in any circumstance. So, craziest of the crazy, you can drink enough water, circle it. Cool. Now we have our absolute non negotiable list. You're going to put this in a note in your phone. You're going to put this in a note on your desk, on your mirror, wherever you will see it, and you will add to it.

This is the start of your success list, which we're going to get into in a little bit.

These things are your new bare minimum. These are the things that you have to do every single day because it's simply what you do. There's no more questioning it, there's no more decisions. How I want you to get this done is I want you to stack it on top of things that are already non negotiable in your life that you might not think about, right?

This is a principle from James Clear in Atomic Habits. You're gonna have it stacked, so you brush your teeth every single day. If you don't drink enough water, right, sticking to the same example, and you put a glass of water next to your toothbrush so you drink it every time you brush your teeth, You now have a h

Transcript

Hello beautiful people and welcome back to the show today. I am going to hand you the keys to success And that is a promise i'm going to deliver on I really am going to hand you the key to your own success in your health and wellness journey so success, what is success?

 In your everyday routine when you're at home and you can go play. grocery shopping and all of those other things is not going to look the same as what success looks like on vacation, where you can't weigh or measure your food.

If you're tracking macros or you may not have control over every single meal, what does success look like in that circumstance? The first failure that always seems to stop people is defining success as one thing. And it's success is completely circumstantial because we're circumstantial as humans, right?

With our resources we have available at the time we have available with whatever. So the first thing I want you to do is take a second and think about What is success at home look like? Does that mean that you had protein at every meal? Does it mean you drank water? Does it mean you went for your walk that day?

Does it mean you got your workout in? What is the list of things that when you finish the day, if you did those things, you're like, that was a great day. That was a very successful day in the pursuit of my best self. Figure those things out. Once you have that list, that is going to be your framework. So, say you're going on vacation, right?

What we're going to do is we're going to take our original list and you're going to circle things that you absolutely can get done without ruining your experience. For example, drinking enough water. That isn't going to inhibit your vacation, you're not going to miss out on anything, that's a non negotiable.

Circle it. Go through the list, find every non negotiable that you can reasonably stick to in any circumstance. So, craziest of the crazy, you can drink enough water, circle it. Cool. Now we have our absolute non negotiable list. You're going to put this in a note in your phone. You're going to put this in a note on your desk, on your mirror, wherever you will see it, and you will add to it.

This is the start of your success list, which we're going to get into in a little bit.

These things are your new bare minimum. These are the things that you have to do every single day because it's simply what you do. There's no more questioning it, there's no more decisions. How I want you to get this done is I want you to stack it on top of things that are already non negotiable in your life that you might not think about, right?

This is a principle from James Clear in Atomic Habits. You're gonna have it stacked, so you brush your teeth every single day. If you don't drink enough water, right, sticking to the same example, and you put a glass of water next to your toothbrush so you drink it every time you brush your teeth, You now have a habit.

It's simple. It's easy. It's not hard to implement because it's stacked on top of something else. I want you to stack all your non negotiables. Figure out the easiest way to get those things done in a way that you will be reminded and it will be obvious if you're choosing not to do it. If you have to reach past the glass of water to your toothbrush without drinking the water, you know you didn't drink the water.

That's all we really want here is the reminder. And then from there, I mean, I can't put it in your hand. Put it in your hand and drink the water. Cool. We've got that from there. I want you to think about your biggest priorities, right? What are the absolute drop everything things in your life and I want you to narrow it down to three and I'm going to tell You why there's only three We only get three priorities because if we have four or five or six or twenty priorities, they're not priorities.

If you're chasing twenty five rabbits, you're gonna catch none of the rabbits. This is something that I had a very hard time with. I could not fucking for the life of me, I could not fathom that every single thing in my life was not actually a priority. And I could not separate them. What happened when I ended up kind of separating them, in my mind at least, is it became it's a no or it's a priority.

There are times when things that are not priorities are absolutely a yes. But in busier times,  that was a clear boundary that I was lacking. That when I started to even have that boundary in my own head, things became a lot more clear as to what I was spending my time on. So that being said, figure out your top priorities.

These are things that are going to become more important than working out immediately. Kids in trouble. Gotta go. From those things, I want you to think about what that means. So for example, if someone really values their family,  Every night I know that Susie and John have dinner with their kids after they get home from work. I'm not going to then schedule their workout times during dinner time. It doesn't fit with their values. I know this concept is a little bit weird but I want you to actually start thinking about it.

What values do you have and what things are actively working against them? So for the dinner time example, if being home for dinner is actively very important to you, That is something that is going to weigh in every single time you're not doing it. So why are we going to add negative reinforcement to a workout and put a workout during that time when every time you work out, you're gonna be like, I should, I should be fucking home for dinner.

Like, what am I doing here? That's not going to help. That's not going to help implement the habit. So what we have to do is a lot of reflection and then none of us like doing that. It's not fun. I didn't claim it was fun. Once you have reflected and been uncomfortable and been like, oh shit. Then, if you really need to take it a step further and really break down how you're spending your time, you're gonna do the 15 minute exercise.

So, 15 minute blocks all through the day from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. You're gonna create a chart and every 15 minutes throughout the day, you are going to write what you did for the last 15 minutes and you are going to  be so hyper specific it's crazy. Went out to the front desk, but I got caught up with a client and they talked to me for 30 minutes.

That's both of those blocks. I have to put that in there. It's not, Oh, well, I was supposed to be doing my check ins, but it's no, it's what actually fucking happened. Cause we tell ourselves stories. I do the same thing. So once you have that, you're going to be able to see very clearly what your priorities are.

Everything we do from this point forward has to check in with your priorities list, . Are we still following me? I've said a lot. So let's, let's go back. Let's reflect. Step one. What is success? Step two. What are the non negotiables? What are the absolute bare minimum things you can stick to reasonably in any given circumstance?

Put them on a list. Then, I want you to figure out what your top three priorities are. What are the things you will drop everything else for, no matter what? You only get three. Then. The last thing we're doing here is we're drawing conclusions based on that. What is going to punish our sense of motivation and our sense of going to do the healthy thing because it's affecting xyz?

I cannot tell you what those things are. This is where you have to do the work. What is going to make it What is going to work out? What is going to make it not awesome to work out? And this goes for anything. What is going to make it awesome to have a salad every single day for lunch? 



Cool. Now what we're going to do is when things are going well, you're like, damn. Fucking go me. I'm losing weight. I'm doing whatever. It doesn't matter what your goals are. These are all just hypothetical examples. Look around very specifically and see what you're doing during those times. So, for example, on my success list, I have turkey wraps.

That's a whole line of it. I know that when I want to cut a little bit of weight down, anything like that, that having turkey wraps and cheese on the go for me is very, very helpful. I don't know why. I just like it. It's easy for me. I'll grab it and go. I'll take it as a snack. That works for me. So it goes on my success list because anywhere I am in the world, that's going to work for me.

Great. This gets very challenging when you don't know what to look for. So I'm gonna give you a few examples of things that I've seen on people's success list that I've been on my success list and your success list will change over time if your life drastically changes, but for the most part, the success list that you have at any given moment should reflect things that you can do any anywhere anytime and it shouldn't matter.

These things always work for you. The purpose of this is that you have built over time a map to your success. These are the things that I do when I feel the most aligned with my goals. These are the things that I do not do. These are the things I avoid. This map is not meant for the good times. What is going to happen is you are going to fluctuate through life like we all do.

You're going to have really fun times in life and really hard times in life. During those hard times that maybe we find ourselves off track due to whatever the circumstance, this is your map back. What am I still doing that's on this list? What have I not done lately that I was doing that's on this list that I know works for me?

This is your litmus test. Are you on track? How are you doing? Okay, if you're on track, on your success list it says that you always have to drink at least 30 ounces of water before noon if you want to drink all of your water by the end of the day, right? Are you doing it? It's binary. It becomes yes or no.

And that is the key. Is that when we do all of these fad diets, which I know that a lot of you listening, like myself, have been on every fad diet, and the thing with it that I hate to fucking admit, I hate it, I hate it every second it leaves my lips, there are little bits of good in all of these diets that we try.

We can take the silver lining from this. Throughout the South Beach Atkins warrior diet mess of a life that I've gone through, there are little things from each of those plans that actually really worked for me, and that I learned worked for me. When we can piece those things together in a way that's completely personalized and we can refer back to it, suddenly you don't need the latest diet book because you wrote the diet book for you.

You wrote it on you and you don't have to know anything about nutrition or working out or anything more than you do right now. And you have the plan. You have the map. You have every single action step. So, when you do this, depending on how hyper organized you are, right? The success list has to be a few things.

It can be a lot of things, but it has to be a few. It has to be universal. These things should work for you in many phases of life. These things should be somewhere where you will see this list and update it accordingly. I want this to be an active thing that you put things into and, ooh, that was a good note, and jot it down.

This should be a very dynamic and active and involved thing that you check in on. However that needs to happen for you is up to you. The success list then has to, in a way, be categorized, depending on the circumstance. For example, things that do work, things that do not work. That's like the simplest version.

Depending on how organized we are,  you can make this a lot more in depth. So, for example, I love a list. I am so listy. Everything's a post it, everything's a list, everything. It's fucking absurd, the amount of lists I have. . It's just chaos, disorganized organization that works for me.

So. That being said, because I'm the queen of lists, my success list is separated by snacks that really work for me. Things I have to do before noon to reach X goal. For example, if I don't eat like 20 grams of fiber by the first half ish of the day, by the second half of the day, it's going to be very hard for me to catch up.

Those types of things. Then I have very specific like routines. Like, for example, I got really into going to the 5 a. m. class of CrossFit way back when I started for a really long time, very consistently and because I was on such a consistent I actually ended up loving it because I got very used to it.

So that was something that really worked for me. I felt like I had more of the day. I felt like I started the day healthier. I felt like I had longer to relax in the morning. Like those types of things worked for me in my headspace. So that was on the success list. You can be as organized or disorganized as you want because a few things that are non negotiable, those should be at the top and we define those first.

So just to kind of go back, Your success list is a basic kind of concept. It's just a list of the things that work best for you. We build to this list when we feel good. We compare against this list when we don't feel so good. It's the map to your success for you and your values. Your values cannot contradict your success list.

So, if being home for dinner is important, working out during dinner is not on the success list. That's not what we're doing, alright? I hope that I simplified this. I know that this is a lot and a lot of direction. I really suggest like going back with a pen and paper and like actually writing it as we go through it.

This is an exercise that I do with so many of my clients that I don't really know why I haven't made any media about it yet. I wanted to put it on the podcast first because I feel like this is by far my most active platform and I really appreciate you guys. So. That being said if you have questions if you have anything that you need to ask feel free to hit up my instagram It's at h may walsh h m a e w a l s h  Otherwise I will see you in the next one you guys are the shit and you've got this and now you have the key to success So what's what's stopping you?

What's stopping you? 

 Okay.

Okay. Okay.