Are Your Habits Sabotaging You?
March 29, 2007
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Are Your Habits Sabotaging You?
- Healthy Habits Wellness Action Group
- Free Wellness Pack
- Cheryl’s Blog - recent posts
If you don’t design your personal environments, they will be designed for you.
Thomas Leonard, www.thomasleonard.com
People don’t fail, their environments do.
Cheryl Miller, www.cherylmillerville.com
For this month’s newsletter, I collaborated with Christi Collins, the Boston Health Coach. She’s fabulous and you’ll get to know a little more about her as you read on because she’s my guest contributor. Here’s Christi:
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According to Cheryl (who I call the Environment Queen), if you have trouble achieving your health goals or putting a new habit in place, it’s probably because your environments aren’t personalized enough for you. To get back on track, you simply tweak your environments so they’re in alignment with you and your goals.
What the Heck Is An Environment?
This is how Cheryl explains environments in her Healthy Habits: 21-Day Challenge workbook:
Many people don’t feel well-supported in life. They feel that life is often difficult and unsatisfying and that healthy lifestyle changes are darn near impossible to make. They don’t realize how much their lives are shaped by the environments they live and work in.
If you struggle and feel unsupported, it’s probably because you don’t yet have enough personal environments in place. Becoming aware of the power of the environment is a critical wellness skill.
Here are a few examples of personal environments: your sleep environment (bedroom), your food environment (kitchen), your brain food (what you read, who you talk to, things you think about), fitness environment (fitness gym, home equipment, buddy to walk with, fitness class), etc.
Please, Don’t Bang Your Head Against the Wall
My environments were thrown completely out of whack after the birth of my son, Evan, last year.
My work environment, fitness environment, kitchen environment, sleep environment, family environment, marriage environment, body environment, even home environment (we moved to a new house when Evan was three months old) were all thrown into chaos.
I tried recreating my old environments after Evan was born, but that just felt like I was banging my head against the wall, over and over and over again.
Ouch. It’s quite painful. I wouldn’t recommend it.
I couldn’t simply recreate my old environments, because my life had changed too much. What I COULD do was tweak my environments so that they worked with my NEW reality of being a mom/business owner/juicy woman.
Now, here’s the part in the newsletter where you might expect Cheryl or me to tell you how to define your environments to optimize your health.
Actually, we can’t do that for you without having a conversation with you.
We can’t define your environments. Why not, you ask?
Well, environments are very personal, and we simply can’t read your mind and tell you what will work best for you unless we’re working with you one of our one-on-one or group clients.
But… if you’re interested in learning more about how you can tweak your own environments and set up healthy habits for yourself, we have a free gift that helps you do just that!
You can Listen in on Christi and Cheryl’s Phone Call
One Sunday night, Cheryl and I were chatting over the phone about environments and habits (yes, this is what we wellness folks do in our “time off” - we can’t help it - it’s too much fun!).
Anyway, we were talking about the habits that each of us is trying to cultivate right now.
Cheryl is currently focusing on her 21-Day Healthy Weight Loss Challenge where she’s getting in shape for a family reunion. I’m currently focusing on my Stop The Madness! Campaign (where I try to take at least 10 minutes out of my day to chill out and not race around like a madwoman).
The call turned out to be pretty eye-opening, vulnerable, and informative…at least, that’s what we think. So we’re sharing the audio segments with you, so that you can listen in to our conversation.
We hope that these recordings will provide inspiration for you…and help you see that creating environments is just one big experiment (one that’s best done with other people to support you!).
Here are the recordings, for your listening pleasure:
The first one is 20-minutes long, and focuses on the importance of your environments.
Taking the 21-Day Challenge course was like having a giant bicycle mirror strapped to my forehead for three weeks. Every time I reached for another Tofutti Cutie I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I loved it and hated it, but most of all, I learned from it. Taken in bite-sized pieces, mindfulness can be a wonderful thing. Thanks Cheryl! Your water-drinking, Ho-Ho-tossing friend.