The healthy habit revolution by Derek Doepker: a step-by-step guide to building better habits.

The healthy habit revolution is a step-by-step guidebook on strategies to improve your practices.

The most crucial step in changing a routine is understanding how patterns work and their triggers.

Cultivating the Growth Mindset

Individuals with a growth mindset value learning and personal development.

They viewed their mistakes as opportunities to get helpful feedback.

As a result, they would act upon that feedback to gain better clarity.

 The Fixed Mindset

A Fixed mindset sees self-improvement to any significant degree as nearly impossible.

Their self-esteem relies upon only seeing positive results and avoiding failure at all costs.

The healthy habit revolution shows that Curiosity is a characteristic that can create changes, no matter how small.

Why You Can’t Change Habits Until You Change This First

That one thing is simply this –How you define success and your perception of how you see success matters.
We typically only see and therefore recognize the result. The mundane daily activities that can help achieve those goals are often ignored.

1. Have a daily action guide (recommend writing your answers by hand on paper.)
2. Think of a reward for completing this challenge.

The healthy habit revolution is not about avoiding failures.

More importantly, congratulate yourself on your daily actions.

Do not wait to feel accomplished after reaching a significant milestone.

This thinking will make it harder for you to appreciate the small wins. In addition, be aware of the temptation of beating yourself up when you do not see the desired results.

This is critically important because habits are built from repeated emotional rewards.

Success

The more often you feel successful, the more likely you will do what made you feel successful.

Success breeds even more success.

If you don’t feel rewarded by doing small steps and making gradual improvements, then you’ll rarely stick with something long enough to handle the accomplishment of a big payoff.

You learned to associate each new behavior with a positive feeling each time you do them. That way, you won’t feel overwhelmed when bitting into a more significant task.

Healthy habits

People have trouble starting a healthy habits because they fear failure, a sign of being too far into a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset.

Since you’re reading this, you’re probably savvy enough to understand: Most of the outcomes you have in your life from this moment result from the habits you’ve had for the past few years.

If you want to see the value in changing your habits, you need to do a little trick with your mind’s perspective to change an unwanted habit.

If a person does manage to give up an unhealthy habit but hasn’t found a suitable alternative, they may trade one bad habit for another.

Quite often, we’re not addicted to behavior but rather the feeling we retain from that behavior.

If you’re unhappy with your current results, showing you the harsh truth of what you’re doing to yourself could be a little painful.

So ask yourself, “Would I rather trade a little pain now for much less pain down the road?”

Considering the critical areas of life that you’d like to improve.

Answer the following questions, being as brutally honest as possible.

1. “If my habits stay the same now, what will my life look like in a year? In five years? How painful would that feel?”

2. “If I incorporated one breakthrough healthy habit into my life, how would my life improve in a year? In five years? How good will I feel?”

 The Seed of Transformation

An apple tree can never change as an analogy, nor should it try to change to become an oak tree.

But it can still grow and become a more developed apple tree that produces more fruit.

With my fitness transformation, I started reading information on the health consequences of my food.

Before then, “unhealthy” was an abstract concept.

I wasn’t overweight, so why should I change how I eat?

Once I realized that I was damaging my body, I had to ask myself, “Am I someone who has so little self-respect that I’ll do this to myself, or am I someone who wants to take care of their body and be in great shape?”

I chose to be someone who values their health, and my habits fell in line after that.

I also saw myself as a “smart person.” When I saw that my choices weren’t brilliant, this conflicted with my identity. As a result, it made me want to change my actions. (regardless of how many cookies I’d have left in the bag.)

What keeps me sane and aligned with my values is the commitment I set before myself to prove to them and, most importantly, to myself that I did have the discipline.

I took on, by choice, the identity of someone who worked hard and practiced to become great at what they put their mind to.
Changing your behaviors also helped change your identity.

You can start by either working on your identity or your behavior. Both will typically shift together.

To Recap:

*, Do what’s congruent with your identity—also known as self-image. Doing so will help you avoid things that feel counterproductive to your identity.
* You can change your identity with conscious intent.
* The process can also work in reverse. That is, changing your behaviors can change your identity.

Action Steps

* Ask yourself, “What’s my lesson from this?” In what ways have you changed and evolved over the years?
* What habits would you have developed if you were to meet the version of yourself that has reached its full potential?
* Write down “I am committed to reaching my potential because…” and explain why this is important to you.

How Your Habits Work

Bad habits are nearly impossible to break unless you do one thing before trying to break a habit.

Charles Duhigg lays out the three parts of the habit cycle in the book The Power of Habit. These three parts are

• The cue –What triggers the habit?
• The routine –The habitual behavior.
• The reward –The pleasure you get makes you want to repeat the habit.

It’s important to note that people can have the same habitual behavior but get different rewards.

I don’t believe dramatic change is possible. You can still progress if you’re curious enough to see what happens.

The more something becomes a habit, the fewer emotions you feel when doing it.

The Six Human Needs That Drive Our Behavior

Rewards are usually emotional. We feel rewarded when we meet one or more of the six human needs.

Those needs are:

• Certainty (also referred to as comfort)
• variety (also referred to as excitement or entertainment)
• connection (the need for connection, feeling loved)
• significance ( the feeling of importance and appreciation)
• Growth ( the needing to improve and develop)
• Contribution. ( being part of something bigger than ourselves)

We feel rewarded by something emotionally because it meets one or more of the six human needs.

You don’t truly get rid of bad habits. What you do is substitute a different routine to take its place.

The wiring of a bad habit will always remain in your brain. What you’ll need is to train yourself to choose a better alternative. Eventually, your brain prefers the new pattern over the old. 

Habits stay programmed in the brain. It’s your choice to remain conscious and implement the proper practice.

This summary is not intended to replace the original book; all quotes are credited to the author mentioned above and the publisher.